LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

i 




Chap. Copraght No. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



RECOLLECTIONS 

OF A MISSIONARY IN 

THE GREAT ^yEST 



jl^obelfif h\> £0t. DBrati^. 



For Love of Country. Sixth Edition. 
i2mo, $1.25. 

For the Freedom of the Sea. Illustrated. 
JOth Thousand. i zmo, $1.50. 

The Grip of Honor. Second Edition. Il- 
lustrated. i2mo, $1.50. 

*' In his titles Archdeacon Brady gives his books a 
great deal to live up to. * For Love of Country,' 
' For the Freedom of the Sea,' * The Grip of Honor ' 
— how the words make the cheeks glow and the 
pulse leap ! That the strong and stirring stories do 
live up to their titles is sufficient praise. An ardent 
patriotism, according generous recognition to the pa- 
triotism of the enemy, the rush of the salt sea breeze, 
the clash of arms, and, best of all, men and women 
that ring true to the call of duty are in them all." — 
New York Titties^ Saturday Rcvieiv. 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 

Publishers, New York. 




^ v^.^;^ 



^>L-z^^^^-x:^ 










RECOLLECTIONS 

OF A MISSIONARY IN 

THE GREAT WEST 



By 



v" 



The Rev. Cyrus ToAvnsend Brady 

Author of "For Love of Country,^' "For the Freedom of the Sea," 
"The Grip of Manor," "Stephen Decatur," etc. 



^ 



Charles Scribner's Sons 
New York . . . 1900 






42010 



Lilir*ury of Con<3reQe 

Iwo CopjEs Received 
SEP 1 1900 

Copynght entry 



No 



SECOND COPY. 

Oetivered to 

OROtH DIVISION, 

SFP IQ 1900 



Copyright, 1900, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 



74437 



THE DEVINNE PRESS. 



TO THE MEMORY 

OF 

ELISHA SMITH THOMAS, S.T.D., LL.Do 

BISHOP OF KANSAS 

AND 
CHARLES HENRY GARDNER, M.A. 

DEAN OF THE CATHEDRAL, 
OMAHA, NEBRASKA. 



PREFATOKY NOTE 

My purpose in writing these recollections is set 
forth with sufficient clearness in the pages that fol- 
low. With a few exceptions, easily identified by 
the form in which they appear, the experiences are 
personal and actually occurred as they are set down, 
to the best of my recollection. I kept no notes and, 
save for references and allusions in occasional let- 
ters, I have had to depend entirely upon my mem- 
ory. Only one story was " made up " for the occa- 
sion, and that combines several actual incidents. 

I hope that this book may serve to interest those 
who read it in the life of the average missionary on 
the Western frontier — a life of mingled work and 
pleasure, joy and pathos, hardship and fun. 

Cyrus Townsend Brady. 

Philadelphia, June, 1900. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter I 1 

How it began — As of William the Silent — Nothing but 
funerals — I was the whole staff — A short-handed 
bishop — Belshazzar — A striking color-scheme — A 
disconcerting eye — The Johnstown flood — The blind 
woman — "I can see!" — Out of the heart- The fif- 
teen-cent baby — Fast asleep — The stopped clock — 
Seek, and ye shall find — Anxious for a souvenir bullet 
— A retort courteous — Against the wall — The little 
maverick 



Chapter II 18 

My first baptism — A motley crowd — Service under dif- 
ficulties—Sponsors in baptism — " Churched " in the 
wood — An agonized mother — God with us — A regen- 
eration indeed — Baptizing the dog — Belshazzar again 
— I become a missionary — Again the Assyrian — And 
the travelling man — The story of a bad boy — Mind 
over matter — " Not%vithstanding " — Disregarding the 
weather — A blizzard — Facing the storm — How I 
breathed — Lost in the snow — Proud of my folly 



Chapter III 36 

Mad at God — Malachi Yant — A lack of experience — 
Information on the hog-cholera- Wearing and bear- 
ing the cross — Daughters of the King — A frontier fu- 
neral — The rich and poor meet together — Told by the 
broken shoes — Supporting a missionary — A sick pig 
—And how he was cured — Speeding the plough — Trifles 
for bread — The farmer's wife — The woman in the 
sod house — It all depends on the rain — Burned up — 
"God's forgot us" — His only chance — Sheridan's 
opinion — A novel horse trade 



Contents 



PAGE 

Chapter IV 53 

An abandoned saloon — Exchanging courtesies with 
the theatre — A wild ride to a wedding — " Coal-oil 
Johnny" — And his broncos — A clerical spectacle — 
Spurs — Swimming the rivers — A grand entree — Tum- 
bleweed — In praise of broncos — How they started 
him — One buck — Making up the amount — A man 
and a hero — What he did not give — Seeing his ante ! 
A raise and call — It never came — Hard luck — The 
heroine of a cyclone — Freaks of the wind — Pluck and 
persistence — A poser— Success in the end — The va- 
garies of the tornado — " From lightning and tem- 
pest, . . . good Lord, deliver us" 



Chapter V . . 73 

No place for weaklings — Burglarizing the station — 
Peanuts for breakfast — What was required of us — 
Sleeping on the platform — Nearly four times round 
the world — What is an archdeacon ? — The " boss " of 
the bishop — Only officially aged — "Lub an' brains" 
— "Doan drap 'em" — The brakeman's story — Stan- 
dards of wickedness — One touch of nature — An Epis- 
copal cat — Vi et armis — An old gleaner — The man 
with the versatile voice — A good word for the men — 
Stumbling over the Hebrews 



Chapter VI 91 

"Held up" by Herbert Spencer — A sand blizzard — 
They called it a hotel — Ventilation through the 
mop-board — Out of it alive — The Overland Limited — 
And its master — Opening the road — A bicycle story — 
Chased by the " long-horns " — The just judge — En- 
tertained by "little Johnny "— On the prevalence of 
chicken — The charge of the feathered brigade — One 
maid of all work to a town — Poverty's independence 
— Two generous gifts — No money in the confirmation 
class — Hoist by my own petard — Good for the Sun- 
day-school library — Revenue from the graveyard 



Contents 



PAGE 

Chapter VII 110 

Profanity — A man, anyway — An interrogation-point 

— The criticism of Orsamus — Warned to keep away — 
Time to be introduced — A Western entertainment — 
The " Hallelujah Chorus " on the trombone — A border 
town — I feel peaceable — A relief from faro — Livelier 
on Sunday — Doubling the stakes for the Lord — A 
doorkeeper in the house of the Lord — Hustling times 

— Too Western — " Scrapple " for a thousand miles — 
Peripatetic churches — Breaking up the ground — 
Train robberies — The Dalton raid — Dying game 



Chapter VIII 129 

The only kid gloves in the Territory — The bride balks at 
obeying — Her religious privileges — " The bride cares " 
— Hard on Episcopalians — Indomitable women — An 
Irish bull — V/hy the Latter-day Saints failed — The 
rivals— Lost identity — Said them to God — Wisdom 
born of experience — I wish it were true — The biggest 
liar he ever saw — Ananias in a new version 



Chapter IX 144 

Jaw-breaking preparation — Unconscious cerebration 
— The chinch-bug — A triumph of science — Devasta- 
tion — A rash offer — Quotations on the bugs — A ten- 
thousand-dollar joke — Following the bishop's order — 
At the muzzle of a revolver — A warrior nurse — Gin 
for the baby — A grim contrast — Died at his post of 
duty — A gentleman indeed — Double duty 



Chapter X 163 

Christmas-tide — Poor foundations — Why the clergy 
are no better — Invincible ignorance — The location of 
Harvard — Better everything in little towns — A safe 
bet — Service in furs— A queer Christmas dinner- 
Potato men — Robbing the church — Christmas gifts— 



Contents 

PAGE 

A Christmas funeral — Shouting consolation— A Me- 
thuselah among horses — A snow-bound Christmas — 
Disappointment — Anticipation — "Now I lay me 
. . . " — Always in order — Santa Claus — And a 
Christmas tree — Christmas service and dinner, too — 
"Real Chris'mus gif's" — Frozen to death 



Chapter XI . 186 

The greatest man I ever knew — Gambling for the 
children — Turning the tables — Revising their creed 

— A compromise creed — Having fun with the bishop 

— An interested driver — Eager listeners — A ritualist 
indeed — Providing everything, even teeth — Broken 
down — Bishop-killers — In apostolic footsteps — A roll 
of men— Just the average 



RECOLLECTIONS 

OF A MISSIOlNARY IN THE 

GREAT WEST 



CHAPTER I 

ONCE upon a time, the dean of an Episco- How it began 
l^al cathedral in a far Western State asked 
a young man, who had been a cadet-midship- 
man in the United States navy and was then 
a railroad official, to join a confirmation class 
he was organizing. The dean and the young 
man boarded in the same house at the time,— 
the dean in the parlor, the young man in the 
garret,— and a great friendship had arisen be- 
tween them. The young man, whose antece- 
dents were all Presbyterian, did not wish to 
be confirmed. AVhen the dean pressed him 
1 



^ecoUections of a 

he replied firmly in the negative, and when 
the dean withdrew he dismissed the subject 
from his thoughts. 

The very next day he walked into the 
dean's office in the evening and announced 
his intention of joining the class. He had 
given the matter no thought in the interim, 
and knew not until long after that the dean, 
and some good friends of his who happened 
to like the young man, had made his confirma- 
tion the subject of special prayer. 
As of William The dean is dead now, but the young man 
will never forget him. He was a great- 
hearted, manly, Christian man, able, devoted, 
hard-working, and so beloved by all who came 
in contact with him that the papers said of 
him after he entered into life, what Motley 
said of William the Silent : '^When he died 
the little children cried in the streets." And 
the words were exactly true. 

In due course, after his confirmation, the 
young man was moved by that which he can- 
not explain to study for the ministry. He 
was very busily employed during the day in 
a responsible position in the general office of 

2 



llJAissionarY in i^e Great West 

one of the great railroad systems of the world, 
and the necessity of supporting his family 
constrained him to continue his work. But 
he found time early in the morning, during 
the noon hours, going to and from work, and 
late in the night, to prosecute his studies so 
successfully that by and by he was ordained 
deacon and appointed assistant minister to 
the overworked dean in the cathedral. 

The first and only duty that devolved upon Nothing but 
him for some time was the attending of funer- 
als. All the unattached Episcopalians in the 
city who wanted to be married, or buried, or 
helped, naturally came to the cathedral. The 
winter was very severe, and there were, I 
think, thirteen funerals in fifteen days, most 
of which the assistant conducted. Life in the 
ministry seemed to be made up of nothing 
but attending funerals, and the young man, 
who had known but little sorrow and grief at 
that time, nearly broke down under the strain 
caused by the suffering he witnessed and 
shared, until the dean came to his rescue and 
took the funerals himself. 
3 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

I u^as the whole The cathedral had a large staff of honorary 
clergy on the rolls, who were all busy with 
their other duties in the diocese and were 
rarely there. The bishop, one of the best and 
sweetest of men, to whom this minister owes 
more than he can say, was very fond of refer- 
ring to the cathedral clergy. Inasmuch as I 
was usually the only one visibly present, the 
people, and especially the other clergymen, 
dropped into the habit of referring to me 
alone as the ^^cathedral clergy,'' in such 
phrases as this : 

^^ We saw the cathedral clergy this morning. 
He was looking cheerful and happy." 

I have never filled so exalted a position 
since then, nor do I ever expect to be so much 
of anything as I was when I was the whole ca- 
thedral clergy myself. 

A short- The bishop, of course, like every other West- 



handed bishop 



ern bishop, was very hard pressed for men. 
He always had half a dozen places clamoring 
for services, with no money to pay for them 
and no men to take them even if there had 
been money ; so he got into the habit, natu- 

4 



l^issionary m i^e Great West 

rally, of asking tlie dean to detail one of Ms 
staff— I was the whole staff— to go out to 
various places on Sunday to conduct services. 
The dean did not like it much, but he com- 
plied like the loyal Churchman he was, and 
one of my first details was to a little strug- 
gling church for colored people. I had writ- 
ten a few sermons for similar visitations and 
for the Friday night congregations of the ca- 
thedral, but due notice of this assignment 
having been given me, I determined to ex- 
temporize. 

I did not have any very great confidence in 
my ability to do so, for the only time I had 
ever tried to speak without notes had been at 
a "sympathetic dinner" which the gun-crew 
of which I was captain while at the United 
States IS'aval Academy had given me on the 
occasion of my being deprived of my exalted 
cadet rank for some boyish prank. I had 
commenced, on that occasion, in a style worthy 
of Pericles, and had lasted for about three 
sentences, whereupon I sat down — collapsed 
rather— amid friendly cheers and laughter. 

The dean was a most fluent and easy ex- 
5 






^ecoUections of a 



Belshazzar temporaneous speaker, and he encouraged me 
to attempt it; so I resolved to try it— un- 
worthy thought !— upon the colored brethren. 
The subject I selected was Belshazzar. I 
find it is a popular theme with youthful 
speakers— exactly why I do not know ; possibly 
because it is supposed to be easy. I found it 
extremely hard. I prepared the sermon with 
the greatest care, shutting myself up in my 
study for days beforehand, and preaching it 
over and over again to imaginary congrega- 
tions, with great effect. 

At last the hour of service arrived. The 
little church, since grown into a strong, hard- 
working parish, was at that time in a very 
dilapidated condition. It had a boy choir 
vested mostly in blue cassocks, with two aco- 
lytes in red ones, and one lone colored brother 
and myself in black. The altar and other 
hangings belonged to different sets, and the 
color-scheme was striking, not to say bizarre. 
It was a ritualistic church at that time, and 
they did a great many things to which I was 
not accustomed and which greatly disconcerted 
me. We managed to get through the service, 

6 



A striking 
color-scheme 



]}/[issionarY in tge Great West 

however, in some fashion, and I have no doubt 
I disconcerted them as much as they did me 
when the time came for the sermon. 

As I stepped to the front of the chancel, on A disconcert- 
ing eye 
that hot August night, to address my perspir- 
ing little congregation, who should come into 
the chapel but the chief examiner of the dio- 
cese, a man whom personally we all loved, but 
whom officially we feared above all other 
men for the severity with which he insisted 
upon a literal compliance with the rigid re- 
quirements before he passed a candidate whom 
he examined for the priesthood. He was a 
tall, thin man, with white hair and a keen 
though kindly blue eye. He came solemnly 
into the church, sat down in a front pew, 
folded his arms, and fixed his eye upon me. 

I returned his stare with agonized inter- 
est. This was not trying it on the colored 
brethren at all. There was a long, dreadful 
pause. Finally I opened my mouth desper- 
ately, and swallowed a gnat ! I moved to re- 
consider, but the motion was lost. There was 
a violent coughing-spell, in which my care- 
fully prepared sermon on Belshazzar was shat- 
7 



flood 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

tered into fragments. When I recovered my 
composure — no, I never did recover my com- 
posure, but when I stopped coughing, aban- 
doning the gnat to his fate, I had no sermon. 
I explained the fact to the congregation some- 
thing in this fashion : 
ne Johnstown "Dearly beloved brethren, I have forgotten 
the sermon which I prepared,— I beg to assure 
you that I did prepare one,— and instead of 
that sermon I will tell you my experiences in 
the Johnstown flood " ; which I proceeded to 
do with great outward unction but inward mis- 
ery. The "cathedral clergy" felt very small 
indeed that night. What the moral and spir- 
itual effect of that discourse was I never 
learned, but I never heard the last of that 
effort, and I am sometimes reminded by my 
brethren, especially the chief examiner, of the 
famous sermon I preached on the Johnstown 
flood ! I would walk around the block to 
avoid him, when I saw him coming, for some 
time after that. 



The blind Among the duties devolved upon me at the 
cathedral was that of daily visiting a hospital 

8 



'^^Issionary in t^e Great West 

near by. In the eye and ear department 
there was a little old woman, wife to one of 
those hard-working, heroic Methodists who 
helped to build up the kingdom of God on 
the distant frontier. She had been blind for 
a dozen years. A hunting-party, in which 
there was an eminent oculist, happened to 
stop at the rude lodge where she dwelt with 
her husband and children. 

The kindly physician, who made an exami- 
nation of her eyes, determined that a cure was 
possible, and had resolved to effect it himself j 
hence the presence of the old woman in the 
hospital. I had visited her many times dur- 
ing her long stay, and we became very well 
acquainted. This of which I speak was the 
first visit I made her after an absence on a 
long vacation. She was in a little room about 
ten feet square. Opposite this room, and sep- 
arated from it by a narrow corridor, was an- 
other room, and the doors of both were open. 

When I entered she was seated, with her 
eyes shaded. She looked at me — actually 
looked at me — as I stood in the door, and 
when I spoke she recognized my voice. 
9 



^ecoUections of a 

"lean see!'' "Oh!" she said, "the operation was per- 
formed some time ago, and it is a success. 
I can see ! I can see ! " She fairly beamed, 
with a chastened, humble sort of joy, as she 
continued : "I am going back home soon. I 
am going to look into the face of that brave old 
man, my husband, who has stood by me in my 
days of darkness. I am going to clasp in my 
arms another, younger man who was a little 
boy when I saw him last. I am going to press 
to my heart a young girl— they tell me she is 
beautiful— who was a baby at my breast when 
the light went out. I am so grateful to God 
that whereas I was blind, now I see, that I 
thank Him every day, every hour, every mo- 
ment, even. I am glad you are come. We 
will thank Him together, first I and then you." 

Out of the heart And SO we knelt down in that little room in 
the hospital, in the stillness of that sunny 
morning, that once blind old woman and I. 
The words which came from her lips were 
rude and simple, but they came from an hon- 
est, grateful heart, and they had a power and 
sweetness all their own. I have heard and 
read many prayers, but not many like that 

10 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

one. It was a most humble young man who 
knelt by her side, and when she had finished 
her own fervent outpouring of gratitude, he 
joined his own feeble words to her expressions. 
And then there was a little silence in the 
room. 

It was broken by the sound of a great, tear- 
ing sob like that which comes from the breast 
of a strong man unused to weeping. We 
looked up from our knees, and there in the 
doorway, with his arms extended in that hope- 
less, helpless gesture peculiar to the newly 
blind, was a splendid, stalwart-looking man, 
tears running down his cheeks. 

^^Oh, sir," he said, with a quivering voice, 
*^you 've thanked God for having given that 
woman back her sight ; won't you pray to Him 
for me?— for He has forever taken mine." 

My poor friend learned after a while that 
there is a country where the eyes of the blind 
are opened. 



There was a little baby in the family of the The fifteen-cent 
young deacon ; in fact, there has almost always ^ ^ 

been a little baby in his family. I remember, 
11 



^ecoUections of a 

to anticipate a little, that on one occasion a 
sagacious neighbor of mine and I were ex- 
changing felicitations over the recent arrival 
in each of our households of another baby— 
not the first one in either case, by any means. 
"I will tell you what it is, Mr. Brady," he 
remarked sagely, ^'I love my children, I am 
proud of them, I would n't take a million dol- 
lars for a single one of them ; but I would n't 
give fifteen cents for another." I entirely 
agreed with him.* 

Fast asleep Well, to return to this particular baby, one 
day when I was writing a sermon, at which 
time, of course, I was very desirous of not 
being disturbed, he came tiptoeing into the 
room, remarking in his childish way, ^'1 won't 
'sturb you, papa," and proceeded to clasp his 
hands around my left hand lying on the desk, 
resting his little curly head upon my arm. I 
wrote on and on in silence. Presently the 
hold on my arm relaxed, the little body 



* Since the above was first published still another baby has 
arrived in my family. I have refused many offers of fifteen 
cents for him. He is not in the market; the price of babies 
has risen! 

12 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

slipped gently down to the floor, the hands 

shifted themselves from my arm to my foot, 

he laid his head upon it and went fast asleep. 

There was a little clock on my desk at the The stopped 

clock 
time. The room was very still, and its ticking 

was distinctly audible in the perfect quiet. 
As I watched the little lad, the clock suddenly 
stopped. We know, whose duty it is to wind 
them, that clocks often stop, but I never re- 
member to have heard one stop before or 
since. The busy ticking died away and left 
no sound to break the silence. I looked down 
at the frail life beginning at my feet, and 
thought of the thousands and thousands of 
lives, young and old, ticked out with each re- 
curring minute— of the stopped clocks a mo- 
ment since quick with life. The lad lay very 
still. In panic terror I awakened him. 

The sermon I had been writing was on the 
Fifth Commandment, a lesson to children. I 
tore it up then and there, in the sight of his 
innocence, and made it a lesson to fathers in- 
stead, that they might be worthy of the honor 
commanded from the children, and I call it 
the boy's sermon to this day. 
13 



l^ecoUections of a 

Seek, and ye When he could barely walk, I took him to 
the cathedral one afternoon when I went back 
for something I had left after morning service. 
I left him down in the nave by the door, 
while I walked up to the chancel. I was 
busied there for a few moments, and when I 
turned to go out, he had advanced half-way 
up the middle aisle, and was standing where 
the declining sun, streaming through the great 
painted west window, threw a golden light 
around his curly head. And a tiny little ob- 
ject he was in that great, quiet church. It 
was very still. 

He was looking about him in every direc- 
tion in the most curious and eager way. To 
my fond fancy he seemed a little angel as he 
said in his sweet childish treble, which echoed 
and reechoed beneath the vaulted Gothic roof, 
these words : 

"Papa, where 's Jesus? where 's Jesus?" 
He had been told that the Church was the 
home of the Saviour, and in this his first visit 
he was looking for him. Seek, seek, my boy, 
and ye shall find, please God, and every other 
boy and girl that seeketh likewise. 

14 



"Missionary m t^e Great West 

That baby is quite grown up now. There Anxious for 

a souvenir 

are no curls on his head ; in no way does he bullet 
resemble— no, not in the faintest particular— 
an angel. The other day, when I rode off to 
the wars, he astonished me with this request 
(he was truculently patriotic during the excit- 
ing period) : 

"Father, if you get wounded, don't forget 
to bring me the bullet that knocks you out, as 
a souvenir for my collection ! " 

I promised faithfully, but fortune was 
kinder to me than to him, and he still lacks 
that souvenir for his collection. 

Talking about children reminds me of a y4 retort 
"retort courteous," and adequate as well, of 
a little girl whom I baptized, long after- 
wards, in a small town on the border of the 
Indian Territory. Her father was a cattle- 
man. It would be no extravagance to say 
that the "cattle upon a thousand hills" were 
his, if it were not for the fact that there were 
no hills on his mighty ranch. Each cattle - 
owner in that country has a different brand 
with which his cattle are marked, and by 
15 



^ecoUectlons of a 

which he identifies them when the great 
"round-ups" occur. The "mavericks'' — 
young cattle born on the range which have 
not been marked— belong to the first man 
who can get his branding-iron on them. 

I could only make that town on a week- 
day, and arrangements had been made for the 
baptism in the morning. The young miss, 
about six years of age, had just started to the 
public school, and she had to remain away 
from one session for the baptism. In our ser- 
vice we sign those who are baptized with the 
sign of the cross. When she returned to 
school, the children pressed her with hard 
questions, desiring to know what that man 
with the "nightgown" on had done to her, 
and if she was now any different from what 
she was before. 
Against the She tried to tell them that she had been 
made "a member of Christ, the child of God, 
and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven," 
but did not very well succeed in expressing 
the situation ; so they gathered about her with 
the unconscious cruelty of children, and 
pushed her over against the theological wall, 

16 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

so to speak. Finally, when she had exhausted 
every other effort, she turned on them in this 
way, her eyes flashing through her tears. 

^^Well," she said, lapsing into the vernacu- The little 
lar, ^'I will tell you. I was a little maverick 
before, and the man put Jesus' brand on my 
forehead, and when He sees me running wild 
on the prairie. He will know that I am His 
little girl." 

The answer was eminently satisfactory to 
the small audience. They understood her 
perfectly, and the profoundest theologian 
could scarce have expressed it better. 



17 



CHAPTER II 
My first IT HAVE told you about my first sermon. 

baptism I 

JL My first baptism was in this wise. Dur- 
ing the absence of the dean on his vacation, 
an undertaker whose acquaintance I enjoyed 
through my numerous funerals asked me if I 
would go on Sunday afternoon down to the 
^'Bottoms,"— i.e., low lands on the banks of the 
river, occupied by a few squatter huts, and the 
resort, especially on Sunday afternoons, of 
men and women of the baser sort,— to conduct 
a funeral for a dead gypsy babe. The gypsies 
were English and claimed to be members of 
the Established Church. 
A motley I agreed to do so, of course, and when I 

drove to the rude encampment of the swarthy 
nomads on Sunday afternoon— they were not 
poor and had provided carriages— I was aston- 
ished to find it the centre of perhaps five hun- 
dred people. An enterprising reporter had 
made up a story about the little dead infant, 

18 



3 l^'issionary m t^e Great West 

which had appeared in the Sunday morning 
paper, with this result. It was a very jocular 
and lively crowd of men and women, the lat- 
ter being from the worst quarters of the city. 
There was talking, laughing, and singing. 
Some negroes were playing on banjos, and al- 
together the assemblage was more like a low- 
class picnic than anything else. The gypsies 
were gathered in their wagons and tents, sul- 
lenly confronting the crowd. Under the trees 
in front of one tent, in a little coffin, lay the 
dead baby. 

I slipped behind a wagon, not escaping ob- Service under 
servation thereby, and put on my vestments, '^^ 

an act which excited some rude and jesting 
comment. I then stepped to the side of the 
coffin, faced the crowd nervously, asked them 
to be silent, and began the service, which I 
continued to read in spite of much noise and 
disturbance. At the usual time I made the 
customary announcement that the remainder 
of the office would be said at the graveside. 

As I turned, one of the women stopped me 
with the statement that they had several 
babies to be baptized. I urged that they be 
19 



^KecoUections of a 

brought to the church, but they refused. 
They were here to-day, and to-morrow gone 
they knew not where. They explained it all 
in their dramatic way : if I would baptize the 
babies then, all right ; if not— and they closed 
their sentences with characteristic shrugs of 
their shoulders. I had made no preparation 
for baptism, but I decided on my course at 
once. 

They brought me an old chair without a 
back, and I placed upon it, bottom upward, a 
horse-bucket. I borrowed a newspaper from 
one of the now deeply interested crowd, and 
tucked it around the bucket to cover its un- 
sightliness as much as possible. On the bucket 
was placed an old tin pan filled with turbid 
water from the river. 
Sponsors in The ^Darents were to be sponsors j but as 
^^ none of them could read English, I asked if 

some one would not read the responses for 
them, and finally, after much hesitation, one 
of the hackmen and a woman of the town vol- 
unteered. The poor creature came forward, 
blushing painfully under her paint, and took 
her place beside the hackman. Fortunately 

20 



'Missionary in tF^e Great West 

I had an extra prayer-book in my pocket, so 
we began the service. The negroes had 
stopped their banjo-playing, and the crowd, 
which had swelled to about a thousand people 
now, was very quiet and very interested. 

The first baby brought to me was a little 
black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy infant, 
about three v^eeks old. When I asked the 
name of this child, the father said ^^Major." 
'^Major what?" I asked. ^'Just Major," he 
replied. And so, with an anxious thought 
toward the old Church injunction that chil- 
dren should be named for some scriptural 
character whose virtues they could emulate, 
the baby was duly christened "Major." Four 
others followed in quick succession. 

When the ceremony was over, I made the "Churched" 

in the wood 
previous announcement again, and was aston- 
ished when the mother of "Major" said she 
had not been "Churched," and would I mind 
doing it? I suppose there are very few 
clergymen in the United States who have 
used the whole of the office for the "Church- 
ing of women after childbirth " in public, but 
with the assistance of the poor woman who 
21 



^ecoUections of a 

had read the responses in the baptism, and who 
now stood by her humble gypsy sister with 
her arm around her waist and with her eyes 
filled with tears, we finished that service also. 

^'Is there anything more?" I asked. 

^^Yes/' said the mother of the dead baby 
coming forward with the little body, which 
she lifted from its cof&n, clasped in her arms. 
^^ Won't you baptize this one? " 
An agonized I gently told her that I could not baptize 
the dead— that it was neither necessary nor 
right. But she would not be convinced. She 
begged and implored, and at last fell on her 
knees before me and held up in front of me 
the still, white little bundle of what had 
been humanity, and agonizingly besought me, 
in the terrified accents of guilt and despair, to 
perform the— to it— useless service. 

I explained to her as well as a young man 
could the situation, told her the baby was all 
right, and that even though she had failed in 
her duty, God would certainly accept her evi- 
dent contrition. Friends took the baby away 
at last, and raised her up, and then I turned 
and faced the awe-struck crowd again. 

22 



^JAissionary in iFie Great West 

The noise had died away, the laughter and God with us 
jests were still, the rude speech was hushed. 
Tears were streaming down the hollow cheeks 
of the wretched women. I spoke to them 
that time out of a full heart. It was only the 
second time that I tried to speak without 
notes, and this time there was no hesitation. 
God helped me. 

They had listened to me say the Lord^s 
Prayer in silence in the service before, and 
when I finished my remarks, and invited them 
again and knelt down in the dust, most of 
those near by knelt with me, and the rest 
bowed their heads reverently, while many 
joined, falteringly at first, but more strongly 
as the sentences came, in the prayer of "Our 
Father who art in heaven." 

They opened respectfully before us as we 
took the baby and walked to the carriages. 
Some of the women laid their hands gently on 
my surplice as with bowed head I walked 
past them. I turned about as we drove off, 
and saw them break up into little groups and 
walk quietly and thoughtfully away in differ- 
ent directions, after such a Sunday afternoon 
23 



^ecoCCections of a 

as probably many of them had never spent 
before. 

A regenera- After the services at the cemetery, the chief 
of the gypsy tribe, a rather distinguished-look- 
ing old man, put into my hand a handful of 
money— coins and bills. I refused to take it, 
saying we made no charge for services of that 
kind ; but he pressed it upon me with the re- 
mark that I could use it for some woman in 
trouble. On those terms I received it. 

That night I had a visitor. It was the 
wretched woman who had read the responses. 
That brief hour in which only as the voice of 
another she had assumed the responsibilities 
of a woman and a Christian had recalled her 
to a sense of her lost innocence and purity, 
and she had resolved, by God's help, to begin 
again. It was a true baptism, a regeneration 
indeed ! The gypsy's money started her upon 
a new way, which she pursued unswervingly 
as long as I knew her. May her feet tread 
the paths of righteousness until the end ! 

Baptizing the This service was a great strain on the ner- 
^^ vous system of the young man, but the baptism 

24 



lyilssionarY in tge Great West 

reminds me of another that I administered 
long after under different circumstances. It 
was in the home of a family somewhat indiffer- 
ent to religion, in a very far Western town. 
I was very anxious, as always, to impress 
them with the beauty and simplicity of the 
service, and I did my best in its rendition. 
The person I baptized was a little boy about 
five years old. After I had finished there 
was a pause, which the lad broke, looking up 
into my face and delivering this remark with 
a solemnity and earnestness which only added 
to my consternation : 

'^Mr. Brady, I baptized my dog this morn- 
ing to see how he 'd like it ! " I always felt 
that the hoped-for effect of that service was 
dissipated by that artless remark. 

To go back,— indeed, I have gone and shall Belshazzar 
go whithersoever my memory leads me, with- 
out regard to chronology, in these rambling 
reminiscences,— shortly after the first baptism, 
the dean, the bishop, and the honorary canons 
went to the General Convention and left me 
in charge of the cathedral. It was a noble po- 
25 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

sition and I enjoyed it extremely. As each 
Sunday came around, the temptation to 
preach without notes would recur with added 
force, and finally, on the last Sunday before 
they all came back, I resolved to try it once 
more. 

Undeterred by my previous experience, I 
fixed upon Belshazzar again as a fitting 
subject. He fascinated me ! * I prepared the 
sermon in the same manner as before, and 
when the eventful Sunday night came I actu- 
ally got through with it — at a breakneck 
pace and in a very nervous and frightened 
way, I admit ; but I did not break down, nor 
stop to give the bewildered people time to 
breathe nor even to consider the various points 
of the sermon, which was doubtless an advan- 
tage for me and for them as well. 
/ become a The next Sunday, as all the clergy returned 
at the same time, from doing everything my- 
self I dropped to the position of a factotum 
whose only of&ce was to hand the alms-basin ! 
Next Monday I told the bishop that I would 
resign my position and go out and be a mis- 

* He does yet ! 



missionary 



'Missionary in tf]e Great West 

sionary— a course which he had been urging 
upon me. Such offers were rare, and he 
allotted me three mission stations with an 
alacrity only equalled by that with which I 
accepted the position. That was the begin- 
ning of a missionary life which took me into 
five Western States and Territories and lasted 
many years. 

The following Sunday I began my tour of Again the 

Assyrian 
duty. I preached on Belshazzar m the morn- 
ing at one place, and made him do duty 
at night at another. On Tuesday I went to 
the third place, and intoxicated with my pre- 
vious success, I used the overworked Assyrian 
once more. 

After the service, a pleasant-looking man And the trav- 

elling man 
stepped up to me, and we shook hands, where- 
upon he said : 

^'That is a very fine sermon of yours." 

I was, of course, greatly pleased, and ex- 
pressed the hope that it had done him good. 

'^Yes," he said, ^4t has. I thought it was a 
fine sermon when I heard it first two Sundays 
ago ; I liked it better when I heard it last 
27 



^ecoUections of a 

Sunday morning ; and as I happened to go to 
the town where you preached on Sunday 
night, I heard it there also. When I made 
this town — I am a travelling man — and saw 
in the paper that you were to preach, I 
thought I would come around and see if I 
could not meet my old friend. I have liked 
it better each time I heard it," he added, with 
a merry twinkle in his eye. "Won't you let 
me know when and where you are going to 
preach it again?" 

Imagine my horror and shame and confu- 
sion. I confessed to him frankly that Bel- 
shazzar was not only my best but my only ex- 
temporaneous sermon, and we became great 
friends. I have hardly ever dared, however, 
to use that discourse since, for something 
always happens when my thoughts turn on 
Belshazzar. 
77?^ story of a Some years later, when I was rector of a 
°^ beautiful parish church in a Western State, 
I preached about him under the caption of 
"The Story of a Bad Boy," which he certainly 
was. During the services we had a vivid 
illustration of what bad boys were, for the 

28 



Missionary in tF}e Great West 

rectory adjoining the church was robbed of 
everything movable and valuable except the 
children, and on that same night, during the 
service, one of the congregation had a fit in 
the back of the church. I wondered if by 
any chance it might be my travelling friend 
who was hearing the sermon for the fifth time ! 

And that reminds me of an afflicted woman Mind over 
who went for treatment to an eminent but 
tactless specialist, who brutally told her, in a 
moment of unworthy petulance, that she had 
an incurable disease which would probably, in 
the end, destroy her mind. She indignantly 
repelled his assertions, and vowed that she 
would show him by her visits from time to 
time that her sanity was not impaired. She 
was a brilliant and able woman, highly cul- 
tured, and possessed of a remarkable will 
power. Her life after that was one long duel 
between her will and the recurring attacks of 
the dread disease. She visited that grim 
physician as long as she was able to do so, and 
he had the bitter satisfaction of gradually see- 
ing the realization of his frightful prophecy. 
29 



^ecoUections of a 

After the last attack, before her mind entirely 
gave way, she begged piteously to be taken to 
that doctor again to let him see she was still 
the master ! And when the final break came 
she clung tenaciously to that dominant idea, 
and all her madness culminated in the expres- 
sion again and again of that desire, until 
death restored the unfortunate to her reason 
once more. As to that ruthless prophet, he 
was deservedly held without honor in his own 
country among those who knew the circum- 
stances. 

'' Not with- I did not attempt sermons without notes 
^ an mg ^^^ ^ long time, and when I did I had many 
bitter experiences before I learned to keep 
my brain a few sentences ahead of my lips 
while standing on my feet. I have frequently 
piled up possible ^'notwithstandings," i.e., 
notwithstanding this, notwithstanding that, 
and notwithstanding the other, and then have 
forgotten just what was to happen '^notwith- 
standing " ! 

Disregarding Other stations were added to my first mis- 
the weather ^.^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^ frontiers of the diocese, 

30 



l^issionary m tF}e Great West 

until I had a large amount of territory to 
cover. I held services at one place Sunday 
morning, drove twelve miles and a half to an- 
other place for afternoon services, and re- 
turned to the first place for service at night, 
taking the other towns on week-nights. In a 
year and nine months I never missed a ser- 
vice. I rode or drove long distances in every 
conceivable sort of weather, under burning 
suns, through tropic rains, in the midst of 
blinding dust-storms, in winter's blasting cold, 
and finally, on one notable occasion, in a 
frightful blizzard. 

We had the usual service on Sunday morn- A blizzard 
ing, very slimly attended, and after a hasty 
dinner I started for the south. I had two 
rough, wiry broncos,— the horse par excellence 
for missionary work, as well as a splendid sub- 
ject for missionary effort,— a sleigh, and a com- 
panion. The thermometer had fallen to 18° 
below zero. The road lay due south, down 
a valley through which the wind drove with 
terrific force. A light snow was beginning 
to fall as we started out, much against the 
wise counsels of everybody, but I was young 
31 



^ecoUections of a 

and foolish and did not take lieed. We two 
men tucked into tlie sleigh between us a little 
schoolmistress who had to go to the next town 
to see a very sick mother. Going down with 
the wind and snow on our backs was not so 
bad, and we reached the church at the usual 
hour. 
facing the Two or three men had braved the storm on 

stOKyyi 

the chance that I might come, as I had never 
failed, though they did not expect me ; and so, 
in the intensely cold church, which it was im- 
possible to heat, with all our winter wrap- 
pings on, we knelt down and said the Litany 
together. Then we got a bite to eat, and the 
horses having been baited and rubbed down, 
we started again, in spite of the remonstrances 
of our friends. It was foolish pride, perhaps, 
but I determined not to miss a single service 
on that day, if possible. Facing the storm, 
which had risen and was in the height of its 
fury, was simply awful. I was actually wear- 
ing summer underclothing at the time, my 
missionary box from the East not yet having 
arrived, and I thought I should die ! Had I 
not been originally one of the most robust of 

32 



''Missionary in iF}e Great West 

men, I hardly see how I could have survived 
the exposure of that day and the rest of the 
winter, but my early training stood me in 
good stead. My companion utterly gave way, 
and finally sank down in the sleigh under the 
buffalo robes, where I continuously kicked 
him to keep him from going to sleep. 

I had a scarf called a '^nubia" wrapped How I breathed 
around my face, covering it all except the lee- 
ward eye, out of which I was continually 
obliged to brush the frozen snow. My breath 
froze on the wool, of course, and I thrust my 
handkerchief between the scarf and my face 
until the handkerchief froze as well. Then I 
bethought me of a little prayer-book which I 
carried in the breast-pocket of my ulster. 
I opened it in the middle and laid it across 
my nose under the scarf, making a little pent- 
house through which I could breathe. 

I tried to keep the way by watching the Lost in the 
telegraph-poles, but very soon lost sight of 
them in the whirling storm. The reins lay 
loose in my benumbed hands. The faithful 
broncos, however, left to their own devices, 
toiled slowly along in the face of the mad rush 
33 



^ecoCCeci'ions of a 

of the wind and the blinding drive of the 
freezing snow over the prairie. Presently I 
lost all idea of the way ; I think I had sense 
enough to keep the horses' heads to the storm, 
but that was all, and I was too cold and too 
much benumbed to remember anything. All 
that I could think of was to keep up my 
rhythndcal kicking of the man at my feet. 

After a long time, it seemed to me ages, of 
such agony as I never want to endure again, 
the horses stopped at their stable doors. It 
was dark night by this time. The stable-men 
were greatly surprised to see us, as they never 
dreamed we would attempt the journey. My 
companion was hastily taken to his house, and 
I was assisted to my own, which fortunately 
was not very far away. Some of the vestry- 
men had come down to the rectory to see if I 
had returned, and they were waiting in great 
anxiety for my arrival. 
Proud of my Before I fully realized the extent to which 
"^ I was knocked out by the hardships of the 

day, I insisted upon taking the little handful 
of men over to the church. We lighted the 
lamps and went through the Litany together 

34 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

again. It was foolish, of course, but somehow 
it is the only act of folly in my life upon 
which I look back with pleasure. Ours was 
the only church in town that night to have 
services. Of course the papers were full of it, 
and the next time I had services what a con- 
gregation greeted me ! I was rather badly 
frozen up, but neither my companion nor I 
sustained any serious injuiy. 



35 



CHAPTER III 

Mad at God XF the weather, however, did not put a stop 
X to the services, it sometimes played havoc 
with those necessary concomitants of religious 
life in the far West known as ^'church socia- 
bles." On one occasion, in one of my missions, 
we had made elaborate preparations for a 
great crowd, which was kept at home by a 
heavy rain. A few of us who had braved the 
storm were seated in great discomfort in the 
parlor, expressing our opinions with the free- 
dom we all use in like circumstances. A 
small daughter of the house, who had been an 
interested listener, suddenly remarked, in a 
pause in the conversation : 

"Now you 're all mad at God because it ^s 
raining ! " 

"Out of the mouth of babes and suck- 
lings . . ." ! 

Malachi Yant My first sexton was a most curious-looking 
Individual who was of the Dunkard persua- 

36 



3 'Missionary in tge Great West 

sion, and rejoiced under the name of Malachi 
Yant. He was a short, squat man, with dust- 
colored hair which stood out from his head 
like the fabulous pictures of the Circassian 
girl in the circus poster. In nothing else, 
however, did he resemble a Circassian. He 
was dust- colored all over, and gave one the 
impression that if he were suddenly shaken 
the dust would radiate from him as water is 
showered from a dog after a plunge in the 
river, especially from that broom-like head of 
hair. When he was not serving the church 
he was a sort of amateur butcher. 

I went to call on him one morning soon A lack of ex- 

ngyisYlCB 

after my arrival. His wife met me at the 
door and told me that I would find him in 
the back yard— he was busy. As I turned to 
seek him, he came around the corner of the 
house. He was a frightful spectacle, all cov- 
ered with blood and animal debris, and smelt 
vilely. I started back in horror. 

''What have you been doing?" I asked. 

''I 've been killin' hogs," he said slowly. 
"Ain't you never seen a hog killed I " he asked 
with some scorn. 
37 



^ecoUections of a 

Unfortunately I never had, and I could see 
that my ignorance caused me to fall visibly in 
his estimation. 

The next Sunday one of the women of the 
parish asked him how he liked the new min- 
ister. 

"I don't like him at all," answered Malachi, 
grimly. ^^He ain't had no experience whatso- 
ever. He ain't never seen a hog killed ! " 

Information on Speaking of hogs reminds me of a long rail- 
og-c oera ^q^^^ jQ^pj^gy j took, during which I became 
very much interested in a conversation with 
a man who sat beside me in the crowded car. 
I found he was an authority on the hog-chol- 
era. The disease is not romantic, but when 
it sweeps away in a few days every cent you 
have on earth— including what you have bor- 
rowed and invested in pork on the hoof— it 
becomes tragic. I discussed the matter with 
him for several hours, and learned a great 
deal about the insidious disease. We both 
got off at the same town, and I invited him 
to come up to the church that night and join 
in the services. 

38 



^yiissionary In tFie Great West 

^^Good gosh ! " he said, looking me over— I 
wore my ordinary brown clothes, and was 
covered with dust, as usual. "Are you a 
preacher?" 

"I try to be, in a small way," I answered, 
smiling. 

"Well, I '11 be hanged ! " he replied in great 
astonishment. "I took you for a farmer ! 
What did you want to know all that about 
hog- cholera for ? " 

He came to the service, however, and after- 
wards became one of my right-hand men in 
another mission. What I had learned about 
hog-cholera proved to be of great value on 
several occasions when I was the guest of 
some of my farmer friends. 

When I reached a certain town on the bor- Wearing- and 
der I always found the church beautifully ^^^^"S' 
clean, the fires lighted, the lamps filled, and 
everything in good order. A faithful woman 
attended to these things. But on one occasion 
I found that nothing had been done. I fixed 
things up as well as I could alone, and after 
the service I went over to her house to find 
39 



cross 



^ecoiCeciions of a 

out what was the matter. Her absence was 
easily explained. She had sustained a serious 
injury some time before, and that afternoon an 
operation had been performed upon her. She 
was a Daughter of the King. When I came 
into the room, she was lying, very white and 
weak, upon the bed. She whispered to me to 
turn down the cover a little. I did so, and 
there, on the breast of her night-robe, was 
pinned the little silver cross of the order. 
She had suffered agonies uncomplainingly, I 
was told, and I understood her when she 
whispered : 

"I am wearing it and bearing it as well." 
They told me she had gone to sleep under 
the ether with her hand clasped around the 
little cross. 

Daughters of Oh, those Daughters of the King ! . How they 
proved their right to bear that name ! I rode 
forty miles, one day, to make a little town, 
when I was archdeacon of another diocese, to 
bury one of them. I had just come from the 
funeral of the bishop in the cathedral. There 
were the sweetest music, the loveliest flowers, 

40 



^'isshnarY In tge Great West 

the white-robed clergy, bishops of the Church, 
and great crowds of people who had loved the 
dead bishop as children love a father ; and 
everything had been done to do honor to the 
memory of that great man who had been 
taken away from us. 

Here in this little town was a humble cot- A frontier 
tage, half dug-out, half log cabin. The winter 
and the spring had been one of the hardest 
through which the diocese had ever passed, 
and the blighting hand of poverty and distress 
had simply deprived the people of everything 
except the barest and rudest necessities of life ; 
they were many of them actually in want. 
The woman who died was a Daughter of the 
King. The five or six members of the order 
who formed the chapter in the village had 
done their best for her. They had gathered 
somewhere a little pitiful bunch of ragged 
flowers which they had put upon her breast, 
where she was laid in the rude pine coffin j 
and with the harsh voices of those whose lives 
are spent in hard toil they sang and chanted 
the service. 

It was the same service, and by chance 
41 



^ecoUections of a 

The rich and some of the same hymns, which had been used 
^°%7ther °~ so splendidly for the great bishop. "The 
rich and poor meet together : the Lord is the 
maker of them all." Man could do no more 
for the one than for the other. The feeble 
cry of a new-born life in the next room sadly 
interrupted me as I read the service. I have 
often wondered if there was not some deeper 
meaning than we dream of in that scriptural 
verse which says : "Notwithstanding she shall 
be saved in child-bearing." There were no 
carriages there. They were all so poor that 
we walked to the little cemetery, a straggling 
procession over the bleak prairie, the men 
carrying the coffin on their shoulders. 
Told by the During the service, as the women sat around 
broken shoes ^^^ j noticed their feet thrust out from be- 
neath the frayed borders of their well-worn 
dresses, and through their broken shoes I 
could see that some of them on that bitter 
cold day had no stockings on ! Yet when 
the chapters of the order sent up their contri- 
butions to pay the salary of a new missionary, 
as their memorial to the memory of the be- 
loved bishop, this little chapter of poverty 

42 



l^issionary m tge Great West 

and care was remarkable for the amount of its 
gifts ! Truly from those who have not more 
is to be received than from those who have. 

There were several hundred Daughters of Supporting a 

missionary 

the King in that diocese who had agreed to 
take ten cents and so use it as to increase it 
to a dollar, more or less, which was to be sent 
to the secretary, to be used for the salary of a 
missionary for the next year. The amount 
which would keep a missionary in the field 
for a year, in connection with the contribu- 
tions he would receive from the people among 
whom he worked, was only three hundred 
dollars. As everywhere, the missionaries 
were poorly paid. They more than raised 
this amount, and they earned it, most of 
them, in very peculiar ways. 

One woman, a graduate of one of the noted A sick pig 
Eastern colleges, whose husband was trying 
to weather a temporary financial storm, a fre- 
quent occupation with business men out there, 
was at her wits' end to know what to do with 
her ten cents, until her husband told her, one 
day, that he had a sick pig on his farm which 
43 



^ecoUections of a 

he would give her for missionary purposes if 
she could do anything with it. Some people 
never give anything but ^'sick " pigs for mis- 
sions, by the way, though this man was not of 
that kind. 
And how he His wife had some little knowledge of medi- 
was cu e ^^^^ ^^^ anatomy and a great deal of common 
sense. She studied the pig and accurately di- 
agnosed his case. Through the kindness of a 
local druggist, she so brilliantly invested her 
ten cents in medicine, and so successfully 
treated the sick porker, that he not only got 
well, but through her scientific dieting became 
the largest and finest of the drove, and sold in 
the end for a very good price indeed, so that 
she had the honor of sending in the largest 
contribution to the missionary's salary. She 
told me she had become so much attached to 
the animal during the course of treatment 
that it was with poignant regret she saw him 
led away to be slaughtered. It was a pure 
case of applied science. 

Speeding the Speaking of college women reminds me of 
P^°^^^ another, who had married a young man, well 

44 



Missionary m t^e Great West 

educated and cliarming, who liad come from 
the East to make his fortune on a farm. It 
requires a peculiar talent to be a good farmer, 
and much intellectuality to grasp the details 
and learn the methods. I found out that it 
was a deep subject the first time I took the 
plough-handles from the young boy who was 
guiding them with one hand. I discovered that 
it was not as easy as it looked, for I ploughed 
that furrow by main strength. I forced the 
share through the earth by my unaided efforts ; 
at least, I could not see that the horses did 
anything particular, except to keep ahead, 
although sometimes the machine took long 
bounds over the surface, so that when my row 
was finished it looked like a succession of dots 
and dashes ! The farmer and his son were 
dying of laughter at my red face, strained 
back, blistered hands, and panting breast, so I 
felt my religious influence over them would 
be gone until I learned how to do it, which I 
presently did. Hie labor, hie opus est ! 

To return to my story, this young man was Trifles for 
utterly impracticable. He knew nothing 
about farming, and did not have the particu- 
45 



^ecoUectlons of a 

lar bent of mind by which he could learn. A 
succession of bad years and partial crop fail- 
ures, and recurring children— they are the only 
crops which never fail on a frontier farm— re- 
duced the family to the direst depths. The 
woman had a pretty taste with her pen and 
pencil, and she actually supported them, 
proudly rejecting any offers of charity, during 
one hard, long winter, by painting and em- 
broidering dainty trifles, which her friends 
carried about throughout the State and dis- 
posed of for her. And she did all the other 
work that devolved upon her, besides. 

The farmer's The life of a frontier farmer's wife is about 
the hardest which can fall to the lot of 
woman. She has duties about which her more 
favored sisters know nothing. All the cares 
of a large and ever-increasing family, with 
several hired hands to cook and wash for, usu- 
ally a calf or two to bring up by hand, a brood 
of motherless chicks needing attention, a 
kitchen-garden, cows to milk, and Heaven 
only knows what else ! She has no society 
and no amusements, very infrequent Church 

46 



Missionary in t^e Great West 

services, with no time to read and no place to 
go. She even finds no interest in the changing 
fashions, for the fashion of her narrow world 
never changes. Her life is a tragedy — the 
saddest of all— of the commonplace. She often 
dies old in middle age, or goes mad. The 
largest group in the State lunatic asylums is 
made up of farmers' wives. 

When by chance she does survive all the 
troubles and labors of youth and middle life, 
she becomes one of the finest, sturdiest, 
strongest, most independent and self-respect- 
ing of women. She has suffered, struggled, 
and not been broken ! The men live other 
and larger lives. They are in the open air, 
mainly ; they go to town frequently, trade, 
discuss, vote. It is a different story. 

Wherever I went, I never got away from The woman in 
culture and refinement. I stopped for a glass ^ ^° 
of water once at a nondescript dwelling, half 
dug-out, half sod house, alone on the prairie. 
As I dismounted from my horse a woman 
came out to meet me. She had been graceful 
and pretty. I could see it in spite of her 
47 



^RecoUecthns of a 

worn, haggard, overworked look. I re- 
marked, as I took the proffered tin dipper of 
water, that I had never seen a house quite 
like that before. She answered that neither 
had she, but that she was even glad for that 
poor shelter for herself and children. She, 
too, was a graduate of an Eastern college, and 
I baptized her two little children before I 
rode away. Her husband was away after cat- 
tle and she was alone. There was not another 
house for miles in any direction. 

It all depends Oh, the hardships the people endured in 
bad years ! I will not slander the Western 
country. When it gets water it blossoms like 
the rose, and crojjs are simply enormous. 
People who live in the East have no idea of 
the fertility of the soil and the luxuriance of 
the vegetation when there is rain. But they 
are equally unable to realize the aridity and 
desolation of the land when there is no water. 
I have seen it when the hot winds came up 
from the south and fairly withered the grain. 
I have ridden for two days through walls of 
corn that towered above my head as I sat my 

48 



l^'issionary m tge Great West 

horse, and two days after I have seen that 
same corn wilted and ruined as if a gigantic 
flat-iron had been pressed upon it. When 
two or three years of drought would follow in 
succession, the misery of the people would be- 
come almost unendurable. 

I remember, after burying the Daughter of Bumed up 
the King I told you of, I hitched up a pair of 
broncos and drove off to a town twenty-seven 
miles away. There had been no rain for 
months. The winter wheat was all killed and 
corn had not yet been planted. The fields 
were bare and desolate beyond description. 
The dust from the roads, where it had not been 
blown away by the fierce winds, was over the 
fetlocks of the horses. Everything was dry 
and burned up to the last degree. It was a 
cold, bleak day in March. 

Driving rapidly along, at a turn in the road " God ' s forgot 
I came across a curious picture. There was a 
dilapidated prairie-schooner, which was in 
this instance a common farm-wagon with a 
tattered canvas top on circular hoops. 
A shabby, faded, dejected woman sat on the 
high seat, holding a nursing baby in her arms ; 
49 



^ecoUections of a 

two little children stood or sat beside her; 
and the father of the family had dismounted 
and was standing in the road by his team. 
One of his horses— wretched creatures they 
were— had fallen in the traces and was dying ; 
the other stood quietly^ with drooping head^ 
contemplating his companion. Half a dozen 
gaunt, starved horses were looking at the 
group from over a fence near by, in a manner 
which strongly suggested compassion and 
sympathy. 

On the other side of the road, in a corn-field 
from which every stalk of corn had been 
stripped by hungry cattle, lay a dead cow and 
two dead horses, which had probably starved 
or died of thirst. There were black crows cir- 
cling around, and over everything the dust- 
blinding, choking, throttling dust ! As I reined 
in my horses, the man sat down in the wayside 
ditch, buried his head in his hands, looked 
at the dead horse, and cried. I heard the 
woman say, ''Don't, papa, don't," as I stopped. 

"You seem to be in trouble, stranger," I 
said. "Can I help you? Can I do anything for 
you?" 

50 



^Viissionary in t^e Great West 

"No," said he, looking up defiantly ; "God 's 
forgot us. Drive on." 

The next year was a bountiful one. Such His only 
crops I never saw, and, to anticipate, for sev- 
eral years after they continued the same. 
Just for curiosity, I once tried to force my 
horse through a field of sorghum used for 
fodder, and found the greatest difficulty in 
making any progress at all, so thick and dense 
was the growth of the cane. In the fall of 
that year, while driving along the country 
road, I came across another prairie-schooner, 
with a happier family of occupants. I asked 
the man where he was going. 

"Goin' back East," he said blithely,— "back 
to old Illinois." 

"Did n't you have a good crop this year?" 
I queried. 

"Splendid, glorious ! Never saw such crops 
—such a yield," he cried. 

"Well, why are you leaving, then?" I 
asked. 

"Stranger," he said impressively, "this is 
the first time in five years that I have had 
51 



3 'Missionary in tFfC Great West 

any crop at all, and it 's the first chance in five 
years for me to scrape up enough money to 
get away. I swore if I got the chance I would 
take it, and that 's why I am goin' back 
again." 
Sheridan's Some of the farmers, the better ones, pluck- 

opinion 

ily stuck it out, and m many good years they 

reaped their reward. General Sheridan said 

that all the nether world needed to make it 

habitable was water and good society. That 

country had plenty of society ; it only wanted 

water. 



A novel horse Horses were cheap there ; in fact, you could 
hardly give them away. I remember, a stock- 
man came to a friend of mine, speaking on 
this wise : 

^'I 've got six young and middling horses, 
well broke and, considering the hard times, in 
pretty fair condition. What '11 you give me 
for them?" 

^^I '11 give you ten just like them," said my 
friend, ^'and think myself lucky to save the 
feed and care of four of them." 



52 



I 



CHAPTER IV 

N one of the border towns we had services An abandoned 
in an abandoned saloon. The building 
was not in a very good location for a saloon j 
that 's why it was abandoned. But it would 
do very well for a churchy— any old place 
would do for that, you know,— so we cleaned 
it out and fixed it up nicely. The town had 
been a very wild one, and the saloon had been 
one of the worst there, which is saying a good 
deal. Men had been killed within its walls, 
and some grim, ominous stains under the 
chancel carpet, which, like Rizzio's blood, 
could not be washed out, told the story ; but 
one of the best missions I ever served was lo- 
cated just there. 

Services were held on one week-day, after- Exchanging 

courtesies with 

noon and night, every six weeks or so, as I the theatre 
could get to them, and were so popular that 
nearly the whole town attended them. A 
53 



^ecoUeciions of a 

wandering and somewhat dilapidated amuse- 
ment company— a concert troupe, I think it 
was— once drifted into the town and made 
arrangements to give a performance on the 
night appointed for the services. Very few 
tickets were sold, and when they inquired the 
reason they found out that almost everybody 
was going to church. They came to us then 
with a pitiful tale, which their appearance 
bore out, of hard times, bad luck, and small 
houses, and wanted to know if we could not 
help them in some way. They said that if I 
would appoint the hour of service for seven 
o'clock they would postpone their performance 
until half- past eight. Besides, they would 
give me a free ticket, and all hands come to 
my ^^show " if I would go to theirs. 

I accepted their offer, of course. They 
were all interested attendants at the service, 
and I believe they reaped a fair reward by 
their compromise from their own performance 
afterwards. That is the only instance on 
record, so far as my knowledge goes, where a 
theatrical company postponed its performance 
for Church services. 

64 



'JVlissionarY Jn tge Great West 



One summer afternoon I found 
twenty-seven miles away from a town down 
in the Indian Territory. I was due there in 
the evening for services and a wedding. 
When I went down to the station in the after- 
noon to take the train, I found that heavy 
rains and a cloud-burst had washed out the 
bridges, and that no train would be sent 
through until the next day. For the same 
reason it would be impossible to drive, so I 
determined to ride. 

A friend of mine, who, because he was the 
agent of the Standard Oil Company in that 
country, rejoiced under the name of "Coal-oil 
Johnny," offered to get a couple of horses and 
show me the way. So I telegraphed ahead to 
the anxious bride that I would be there that 
night— a little late, perhaps, but that I would 
surely come. I strapped up some vestments 
in a little roll and put it on my shoulders, as 
I had an idea of what we might expect, 
mounted the broncos, and away we started. 

I have ridden many broncos, but this was 
the worst I ever rode. To be strictly accurate, 
I could hardly say that I rode him at all ; I 
55 



myself A wild n'de to 
a wedding 



"Coal-oil 
Johnny'' 



And his 
broncos 



^ecoUections of a 

managed to stick on, and that was all. He 
bucked and kicked and bit and shied and 
stopped and balked and did everything for 
which his breed is famous. It sometimes 
seemed to me that he was doing all these 
things at the same time. 
A clerical When he made up his mind to "go," how- 

specace ^ygv, he went like the wind. On the old 
principle of being in Rome and doing as the 
Romans, I soon learned that the cow-boy 
method of letting the reins hang loosely, lift- 
ing them high in the air, digging in the spurs, 
and yelling frantically in his ear was the best 
way to accelerate his pace. He would run 
and continue to run like a frightened deer as 
long as the notion seized him, and a nice, dig- 
nified spectacle we must have presented at 
such times. It was exhilarating, but danger- 
ous, for the ground was full of prairie-dog 
holes hidden in the buffalo-grass, and we 
never knew when the bronco might put his 
foot in one, break his leg, and perhaps kill his 
rider, to say nothing of the dog. 
Spurs Coal-oil Johnny's horse was quite as bad 

as mine. He said he had meant to give me 

56 



l^lsslonary in tge Great West 

the better of the two, but mine seemed the 
worse— perhaps because I rode him. They 
had strapped on my boots a pair of Mexican 
spurs with rowels like sharks' teeth, which 
annoyed me very much more than they did 
my bronco. Every time I inadvertently 
touched him he had a fit. However, they 
were the only things by which he could be 
coerced in any degree. 

We had to swim two rivers and one creek. Swimming the 
I had crossed them a few days before on the 
train ; they were almost dry in their beds j 
now they were roaring torrents. This is a 
common occurrence with those streams. We 
forced the horses in the swirling, muddy water 
of the river, and, when we got into the deep 
water, slipped out of the saddle, and retaining 
tight hold of the high horn, swam alongside 
to relieve them of our weight. The current 
swept us down the stream with fearful veloc- 
ity, and it was only after a long, hard struggle 
that we reached the other bank a long dis- 
tance below our starting-point. We were 
forced to mount while the horses were scram- 
bling out of the water, or we would have had 
57 



^ecoUections of a 



A grand 
entree 



Tumbleweed 



great difficulty in getting into the saddle 
again. The other streams not being so deep 
nor so swift^ we remained in the saddle. 
When I was in the deep water and touched 
him with the spur, I found that I finally had 
the advantage. He could n't buck or do any- 
thing but hump himself and snort, both of 
which he did with great vehemence. 

Late in the evening we reached the town. 
Pretty much the whole population were out 
on the sidewalks, including the groom and 
friends of the bride, and, amid wild cheering 
and laughter, the two wet, bedraggled figures 
rode down the main street, both horses reserv- 
ing this particular moment for the final exhi- 
bition of their general and entire wickedness. 
I could just manage to walk to the church 
that evening, for I never was so sore and stiff 
in my life. 

We had a pretty wedding, though the con- 
verted saloon was only decorated with tum- 
bleweed, and the carpet upon which the 
bride walked to the groom's spring-wagon 
was of the kind popularly known as ^'rag" j for 
the bride was pretty and the groom was 

58 



'{VlisslonarY in tge Great West 

manly, and, after all, those are the things 
which count. 



I said that the bronco was the best possible ?« pfoise of 

broncos 

horse for missionary journeyings, and so he is. 
He is an ugly, ill-tempered, vicious, cross- 
grained, undersized, half-starved, flea-bitten, 
abandoned little beast, and he gives the mis- 
sionary abundant opportunity to practise the 
sublime virtue of self-restraint. As a horrible 
example of total depravity he beats anything 
that I know of. He is apt to do anything, ex- 
cept a good thing, at any moment. When he 
appears most serenely unconscious look out 
for him, for that is the hour in which he medi- 
tates some diabolical action ! 

He bucks when he is ridden and balks 
when he is driven, but once get him going 
and he shows his mettle. He can go, and go 
like the wind, and go all day, and live on one 
blade of grass and one drop of dew, and keep 
awake all night,— and keep you awake, too,— 
and go again all next day, and keep it up 
until he tires out everything and everybody 
in competition with him ; for when you get 
59 



^ecoUectlons of a 

him started, you can absolutely depend upon 
him. He never gets sick nor breaks down, 
and I do not believe he ever dies. But it 
is awfully hard getting him started some- 
times. 

How they I knew a missionary party that had a pair 

of broncos, one of which could be started only 
in one way. The other, of course, was in sym- 
pathy with and regulated his movements by 
his companion. Two disinterested people 
who were not going with the party would 
pass the bight of a stout rope around the hind 
fetlocks of the recalcitrant animal, and each 
take one end and saw away until you could 
almost smell the burning hair, when, without 
one word of warning, the beasts would bolt, 
and from that time would go all day cheer- 
fully, at the liveliest kind of a trot, provided 
they were not halted for anything. If they 
were stopped the same process would have to 
be gone over with again. 

One buck Moral suasion was entirely lost on those 

horses, yet you could not help liking them ; 
they were so mean they were actually charm- 
ing ! I never shall forget the first time that 

60 



l^'iss'ionarY in t/)e Great West 

ever I threw my leg across the back of one of 
these animals. He bucked just one buck. I 
did not stay with him more than a second, but 
the impression he made in that second was a 
lasting one. I can feel it yet. 

Coal-oil Johnny and his broncos remind Making up 

^ . .^^ the amount 

me of my first service in the Territory. All 

that I asked of the people who came to the 
services, including a large number of cow- 
boys, was that they should pay my travelling 
expenses, my support being provided else- 
where. After the services I noted that the 
offering amounted to less than one dollar, 
which was not nearly enough. 

I stepped out among the congregation and 
told them the facts, and stated that I had 
heard of the proverbial generosity of the cow- 
boys, and in other places experienced it, but 
that it did not seem to be a quality of the men 
before me. There was a pause for a moment, 
and the nearest man walked up and put a 
dollar in the collection-basket. His example 
was followed by others until there were a 
number of silver dollars there, and I never 
61 



^ecoUections of a 

had occasion to speak on the subject in that 
town again. 
A man and I am very fond of the genuine cow-boy, 
now fast disappearing. I ^ve ridden and 
hunted with him, eaten and laughed with 
him, camped and slept with him, wrestled 
and prayed with him, and I always found him 
a rather good sort, fair, honorable, generous, 
kindly, loyal to his friends, his own worst 
enemy. The impression he makes on civili- 
zation when he rides through a town in a 
drunken revel, shooting miscellaneously at 
everything, is a deservedly bad one, I grant 
you ; but you should see him on the prairie 
in a round-up or before a stampede. There 
he is a man and a hero ! 

What he Speaking of collections, a man came up to 
<?'^- me one day after service, and was pleased to 
address me in this manner : 

''Say, parson, that there service and sermon 
was grand. I would n't have missed 'em for 
five dollars ! " 

When I suggested that he hand me the 
difference between the amount he had put in 

62 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

the collection and the figure he mentioned, 
for my missionary work, he stopped suddenly, 
looked at me with his mouth wide open, and 
then slowly pulled from his pocket four dol- 
lars and ninety cents, which he handed to me 
without a word ! 

He, like many others, resembled that old 
woman who said she had been a Christian for 
fifty years, and she thanked God it had never 
cost her a cent ! 



I used to have other weddings from time to Seeing- his 
time, and on one occasion I had two in the a raise and 



same town on the same day, one in the morn- 
ing, one in the afternoon. The first wedding 
fee I received was ten dollars, a very large 
remuneration for the place and people. After 
the second wedding, the best man called me 
into a private room and thus addressed me : 

^^What 's the tax, parson T' 

"Anything you like, or nothing at all," I 
answered. (I have frequently received 
nothing.) 

"Now," said he, "we want to do this thing 
up in style, but I have had no experience in 
63 



call! 



'RecoUections of a 

this business and do not know what is proper. 
You name your figure." 

I suggested that the legal charge was two 
dollars. 

"Pshaw!" he said, "this ain't legal. We 
want to do something handsome." 

"Go ahead and do it," I said ; whereupon he 
reflected a moment, and then asked me how 
much I had received for the wedding of the 
morning. 

"Ten dollars," I replied. 

His face brightened at once. Here was a 
solution to the difficulty. 

"I '11 see his ante," he remarked.^ "Kaise 
him five dollars and call." Whereupon he 
handed me fifteen dollars. 

// neuer The first wedding I ever had was the mar- 
riage of a cable-car gripman and a little dress- 
maker. The man disconcerted me greatly by 
repeatedly urging me before and during the 
ceremony to hurry up, as he only had a lay- 
off for one trip. When I finished he said he 
would see me next week— but that next week 
has never come around. 

64 



came 



Missionary in i^e Great West 

The churches in the West suffer greatly Hard luck 
from cyclones, properly called tornadoes, 
though I shall use the popular name. During 
the four years in which I was connected with 
one diocese as its archdeacon we lost one 
church every year from that cause. The 
dwelling-houses and other buildings of a great 
many of our adherents were wrecked, and in 
several instances some of them lost their lives. 
One Sunday I was called upon to preach a 
memorial sermon for a young woman who had 
been killed in one of these cyclones. 

She was a schoolmistress and was boarding 
around. With something like a dozen people, 
I forget the exact number, she was caught in 
a large house, which stood on the edge of a 
high bluff, by a tremendous cyclone. The 
house was completely wrecked, and every in- 
mate of it except one was killed immediately 
or died within an hour or so. The one who 
survived, though badly injured, said that the 
family were at supper when the storm struck 
the house ; that the little schoolmistress hap- 
pened to sit next the omnipresent baby at the 
table in its high chair. 
65 



^ecoUections of a 

The heroine Wlien they found the poor girl that night, 
she was still alive, though unconscious, and she 
died almost instantly. The awful force of the 
wind had torn from her person everything she 
had on, including two rings, except one shoe. 
Her hair was actually whipped to rags. 
She had been driven through several barbed- 
wire fences, and every bone in her body was 
broken. In her arms, however, and clasped 
tightly to her breast, was the dead body of 
that little infant j womanlike, she had seized 
the child when she felt the shock of the storm, 
and not even the tornado itself had been 
strong enough to tear the baby from her arms. 
It was a splendid example of that altruistic 
instinct of womanhood upon which religion 
and society depend. 

Dead on the field of honor, little mistress of 
a larger school ! Blessed is her name among 
those who knew her 5 and this will give a 
wider circulation to this story of every-day 
heroism. 

All the other churches closed their doors 
on this occasion and united with us in doing 
honor to this heroic girl. 

66 



Missionary m t^e Great West 

The first visit the bishop of that missionary 
jurisdiction made in that town, he had to 
bury, I think, nineteen victims of that cyclone. 

One of the churches we lost had just been Freaks of 

the wind 
completed a second time after having been 

partially destroyed previously by fire. About 
fifteen feet away from the church was a little 
ramshackle three -roomed house of the flimsi- 
est construction which was used for the rectory 
—save the mark ! Between the two stood a 
large maple-tree, certainly a foot in diameter. 
That cyclone tore the church building to 
pieces. There was not a single piece of timber 
left standing, and even the stones of the foun- 
dation-wall were scattered all over the adjoin- 
ing country. That tree next to the church 
was twisted off about six feet from the ground, 
and the whole top disappeared, we knew not 
where 5 the end that stood in the air was 
shivered like a paint-brush. And the little 
rickety house, not ten feet from the tree, and 
which a strong man might almost have top- 
pled over, was not injured in the slightest 
degree ! 
67 



^ecoUections of a 
Pluck and Oh, but the people of that mission were 

persistence ^^^^^^ j rpj^^^ ^^^ 1^3^. ^.j^^ ^^^^ church by 

fire, the second by cyclone, and the wind had 
hardly died down before they commenced to 
lay plans and raise money— that was the first 
thing, of course— to build again. All the com- 
municants were women. There were one or 
two men who helped a little, but the bulk of 
the work was done by the women. 

Their religious services had been carried on 
by a lay reader, quite the most inefficient one 
I ever saw, who was a candidate for orders. 
He had been transferred to us from another 
diocese farther east, and we had but little op- 
portunity to try his mettle. We got all sorts 
of queer things unloaded upon us from the 
East, including clergymen. Bishop Williams 
is reported as having looked back with great 
satisfaction on the number of men he kept out 
of the ministry— on account of iheir manifest 
unfitness, of course. We used to think that 
many of those he did not keep out came out 
West. The regular clergy and missionaries 
were as noble and able and devoted a body of 
men as any with whom I ever came in contact, 

68 



'Missionary in tge Great West 



but deliver me from those who came West be- 
cause they failed East. That kindly bishops 
sometimes palmed them off on their poorer 
Western brethren did not help matters at all. 

This particular lay reader came up for 
examination shortly after the cyclone, and 
his ignorance was painful and pitiable. The 
chief examiner of that diocese, a venerable 
and learned old priest, asked him as the first 
question : 

"Where was our Saviour born ? " 

A look of deep anxiety spread over the face 
of the young man, who groped around in his 
mind in painful silence, and finally said hesi- 
tatingly: "Well, I do not believe I know 
where he was born. I think maybe it was in 
Jerusalem ! " 

"That will do, sir," said the chief examiner, 
sadly but firmly. "I will not continue the 
examination any further." 

The entire unfitness of the young man was 
made manifest by other circumstances as well. 
Their experience with him, the people said, 
had been worse than with the cyclone. When 
he was dropped, they were put on my list by 
69 



A poser 



Success 
in the end 



^ecoUections of a 

the bishop for occasional services until I could 
get them a clergyman. They fitted up the 
little rectory as a chapel, and began to raise 
funds for a new church building. When they 
were in a fair way of completing the desired 
sum, the city chose to pave the streets around 
the church, which took all they had in the 
bank. Nothing daunted, however, they still 
persisted, and now they have a very pretty 
little church, a resident clergyman, regular 
services, and as many men communicants as 
women. I do not know of anything pluckier 
than their long fight. They have learned 
something, too, and, in addition to a fire they 
carry a cyclone insurance. 

77?^ vagaries I have known cyclones to play some strange 
of the tornado , ^ • ^ i 

pranks. On one occasion two horses were 

lifted up in the air and carefully deposited 

unharmed in a walled field about an eighth of 

a mile away. I saw them there. I have seen 

chickens and geese with every feather torn 

off of them, picked clean, and still feebly 

alive. One house I remember had a hole 

about ten feet in diameter cut out of its roof as 

70 



'^IssionarY m tF}e Great West 

if by a circular saw, evidently by the very tip- 
end of the funnel. It was otherwise un- 
touched. 

I have seen the black whirling cloud sweep- 
ing through a valley at a terrific rate, its fell 
progress marked by the destruction it caused, 
as it actually leaped and bounded through the 
air. I saw that one pick up an out-building 
and apparently lift it up and shake it to 
pieces as one shakes a pepper-box. 

One of the worst ones I ever knew tossed 
a heavy iron safe about as a child might 
a wooden alphabet-block in play. I have 
known of a house wrecked and all of its in- 
mates killed, and other instances where no 
one was hurt, although the building was liter- 
ally blown away from them. When buildings 
were completely torn to pieces they frequently 
presented the appearance of having been 
wrecked by some inside explosion, especially 
if they had been shut up when the storm 
broke. 

Of all the manifestations of power that I '^^^^""^Jf^^. 

ever witnessed,— and I happen to have seen pest, ...good 
' Lord, deliver 

almost everything, from an earthquake down, «5" 

71 



3 'Missionary in tF}e Great West 

except a volcano in eruption^— a cyclone, or 
tornado, is the most appalling. The midnight 
blackness of the funnel, the lightning dart- 
ing from it in inconceivable fierceness, the 
strange crackling sound which permeates it 
the suddenness of its irresistible attack, its in- 
credibly swift motion, its wild leaping and 
bounding like a gigantic ravening beast of 
prey, the destruction of its progress, the awful 
roar which follows it, the human lives taken 
in the twinkling of an eye, the wreck of prop- 
erty and fortune in its trail— may God deliver 
us from that mighty besom of wrath and de- 
struction ! 



72 



CHAPTER V 

THE physical weakling has no place in the No place for 
missionary work in the West. The dis- 
tances to be covered are so great, the number 
of places necessarily allotted to one man so 
many, the means of transportation so varied 
and unpleasant, the demands upon strength 
and bodily vigor so overwhelming, that it is 
no easy matter for the strongest to live up to 
the requirements. 

I had just been holding a parochial mission 
—what most people would call a revival, 
though with many of the distinguishing fea- 
tures of a revival omitted— in a certain little 
town. There had been three or four services 
a day for a week, with a crowded church every 
night. Naturally the work was exhausting. 
At the end of the week I was tired, but im- 
perious necessity compelled me to undertake 
the following journey. At the close of the 
mission at half after nine o'clock on Sunday 
73 



^ecoCCeciions of a 

night, on the 1st of January, the weather 
being clear and intensely cold, I drove, in 
company with another man, twenty-two miles 
to catch a train on the Memphis road. 

Burglorizing We arrived at the little way-station at half- 

the station . • . ^ • X4- t. i. j 

past one m the morning. It was shut up and 

deserted, and the town was a mile away. We 

first blanketed our shivering horses, and then 

set about making ourselves comfortable. We 

broke into the station through the window, 

smashed up a packing-box, carried lumps of 

coal with our hands from a coal-car outside, 

drenched the whole with oil from the lamp, 

and with great difficulty made a fire in 

the stove. After partaking of our frugal 

lunch, my companion started on his return 

trip, leaving me alone in the station for a long 

time. When the train, which was two hours 

late, came along, I hunted up a lantern and 

flagged it. 

When I entered the coach I saw that the 

Baker heater was in the wrong end of it 

and the car was like an ice-house. There 

were several women and children whom the 

male passengers had made comfortable with 

74 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

their overcoats, who were crowded up close 
to the heater in the rear end. The men 
kept themselves alive by walking up and 
down the aisle in a long line. I joined the 
procession. 

We reached Kansas City very late. I had Peanuts for 

breakfast 

only time to connect with another tram ; had 
no breakfast except peanuts. I have made a 
meal of peanuts bought from the train-boy 
many and many a time in my experiences, 
and have been thankful to get them. I 
reached my destination about one o'clock ; had 
services, with sermon and a meeting of the 
Women's Guild, in the afternoon ; services and 
sermon again, with baptism and a public re- 
ception, at night. I retired at 11 : 30 p.m. and 
arose at 2 : 30 in the morning to take another 
train, which I never left until six o'clock 
the next evening. After services, a sermon, 
and a baptism that night, I was thoroughly 
done up. 

Here is the record of two weeks, by no what was 
means unique, taken from my journal ; and be ^^^"^^^ 
it noted that at every place where we had 

75 



Recollections of a 

services there was, of course, a sermon and an 
address : 

Friday. Service at M in evening. 

Saturday. Left M at 3:30 a.m. 

Eeached P at 6 p.m. Service. 

Sunday. Left P at 1 A.M. Keached 

C at 2 : 30 A.M. Services at 7, 9, and 10 

A.M. Left C at 11 : 50 a.m. Keached 

A at 6 P.M. Services at night and next 

morning. 

Monday. Eeached C at 3 p.m. Ser- 
vices afternoon and evening. 

Tuesday. Drove to M . Services at 

night. 

Wednesday. Left for L at 6 a.m. 

Services at 10 : 30 a.m., 3 : 30 and 7 : 30 p.m. 

Left L 11 P.M. 

Sleeping on Thursday. Keached the station at 4 a.m. 
epa/orm ^^^^^ driving thirty-two miles. Lay down 
on the platform and went to sleep until the 
arrival of the way freight, 5 : 30 a.m. (N.B. 
This was a common practice in summer. I 
have had many sound sleeps on station plat- 
forms, with a valise for a pillow and the open 

76 



missionary In t^e Great West 

sky for a cover.) On freight all day. 

Eeached W at 7 : 30 p.m. Services in the 

evening and next morning. 

Friday. Eode ten miles to catch express. 
Arrived at C at 6 p.m. Services and wed- 
ding rehearsal that night. 

Saturday. Services at 7 a.m. Baptismal 
service at 8 : 45. Services at 9 a.m. Eode 
five miles into Indian Territory to baptize 
and admit to the communion a dying man. 
Baptized his wife and children. Eode back 
to church, solemnized a marriage. Took train 
for S at 2 p.m. Services at 8 p.m. 

Sunday. Services at 7, 9, 10, and 11 a.m. 

Left at 1 P.M. for W . Services at 

night. 

Monday. Drove twelve miles for country 
service. All-night ride to L . 

Tuesday. Convocation at L . 

Wednesday. Eeached H . Two wed- 
dings in afternoon, services at night. 

Thursday. Met the bishop in the after- 
noon. Drove fifteen miles to E . 

Services. 

Friday. Services at M . 

77 



Nearly four- 
times round 
the world 



What is an 
archdeacon ? 



^ecoUections of a 

Saturday. Services afternoon and evening 
atW . 

Sunday. Services at 8, 10, and 11 a.m. at 
M- again. Drove twelve miles for after- 
noon service at W . Eeturned in time 

at 7 : 30 P.M. 



for services at M- 
Monday. I rested. 

There are dozens of missionaries and clergy- 
men out West who would regard a trip like 
that as nothing at all. I did not mind it 
much myself. 

In three years, by actual count, I travelled 
over ninety-one thousand miles, by railroad, 
wagon, and on horseback, preaching or deliv- 
ering addresses upward of eleven hundred 
times, besides writing letters, papers, making 
calls, marrying, baptizing, and doing all the 
other endless work of an itinerant missionary. 
And that reminds me of the question so 
often asked. What is an archdeacon? He is a 
man who helps the bishop do just the sort of 
things I have described. Most people are 
familiar with the answer of the English 
bishop who was requested by Parliament to 

78 



l^isslonary m t^e Great West 

define the duties and work of an archdeacon, 
whereupon he sapiently replied that the 
principal work of an archdeacon was to per- 
form archidiaconal functions. A friend of 
mine put it rather cleverly this way : 

^^Considering a deacon as a minister or 
server, an archdeacon bears the same relation 
to a deacon as an archfiend does to a fiend— 
he is the same thing, only more so." 

It was difficult for the people in the little The "boss" 
towns to get the title straight, and I was usu- ^ '^ ^^ 

ally advertised as the archbishop. On one 
occasion, when inquiry was made by some one 
as to what an archbishop was, this reply was 
given : ^' Why, an archbishop is a kind of a boss 
of the bishop." The bishop and the clergy 
got hold of this story, and they called me "the 
boss " until I felt like a politician. 

The official title of an archdeacon is the Only officially 
Venerable. People who did not know me ^^^ 
would learn that much, and make careful prep- 
aration for the reception of an old decrepit 
man— warm beds, bright fires, easy-chairs, etc. 
79 



'RecoUections of a 

When I appeared they would look upon me 
as a fraud because I was only venerable offi- 
cially. I enjoyed the comforts just the same. 
Such a reception was better than being 
ushered into a stone-cold ^'best room," and left 
with the cheerful remark that no one had 
slept in the room since ^'grandmother died." 
As I crept into bed I did not wonder the poor 
old lady had expired. I felt like it myself. 

''Luban' Speaking of missions a moment since re- 
minds me of an appreciative remark with 
which I was greeted by a nice old colored sis- 
ter at the close of one of my missions, which 
had been held in this instance in a colored 
church. This turbaned, aged woman at the 
close of the services grasped me by the hand 
and saidj "Gord bress yer fer yer lub, bruder, 
an' oh, Gord bress yer fer yer brains ! " 

'Doan drap I always valued that saying very highly j 
and that reminds me of another old colored 
woman of my acquaintance, who belonged to 
the Methodist Church, though she was the 
sexton of our church. The Methodists were 

80 



'jyiissionary m tge Great West 

having a revival, during which this old woman 
felt called upon to make a prayer. She com- 
menced with the stern spirit of an ancient 
Puritan, and closed with the tenderness of an 
old Southern mammy: ^'Oh, Lawd, tek de 

sinnahs ob C an' shek 'em obah de fiahs 

oh hell— but please, Lawd, doan drap 'em." 

I used to meet many interesting characters Thebmke- 
upon the trains. Once when I was taking a ^^" ^ ^ °^^ 
little relation to visit his grandmother, we 
came back from the dining-car to our seats in 
the coach on the B. & M. road, late in the 
evening, and found the brakeman sitting in 
one of them, with a little story I had been 
reading— ^'Sunset Pass," by Captain King— in 
his hand. 

He immediately arose and handed me the 
book. 

^^No," I said ; "sit still and read a little, if 
you wish to." 

"No, sir," he replied, resuming his seat ; "I 
never read any more novels while I am on 
duty, because of something that happened to 
me once." 
81 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

**01i!" said I, scenting a story, ^^how was 
that?" 

"Well, sir, I was readin' a story one day— 
^t was a blamed good story, too ; name of it 
was ^ White Cloud' or ^Red Cloud.' This 
next station always reminds me of the name." 
(We were nearing White Cloud station.) 
'^ Seems to me that Cap'n Mayne Reid wrote 
it. Anyhow, I was brakin' on a freight on 
the Wabash— rear-end brakeman. We ran 
off the main line onto a sidin' to wait for the 
fast express to pass by us. It was a lonesome 
little place, an' I was sent back to throw the 
switch for the express-train. She was late, 
an' I walked along to the switch, readin' as I 
went, an'— would you believe it, parson!— I 
never throwed that dog-gone switch at all ; 
just set down on the bank under a tree an' 
read away. All of a sudden I heard the 
whistle of the express, an' here she was, a-com- 
in' around the bend like— like— well, she was 
makin' forty miles an hour maybe ; an' at that 
minute I seen the target of the switch was 
pointin' straight at me, an' I knew that switch 
was n't throwed, an' in a minute she 'd be 

82 



^VHssionary in tge Great West 

crashin' into that freight, an' there 'd be 
trouble ! Gosh, parson ! I tell you I dropped 
that fool novel an' put for that switch ; an' I 
got it, too. But I had n't no more than 
throwed it over than the front wheels of that 
there engine passed over it. 'T was a mighty 
close call." 

"Well, what did you do with the book? 
Did you ever finish the story ? " I asked. 

"No ; I just set there on the bank tremblin' 
till the conductor called me into the caboose. 
An' I never picked up the book again ; just 
left it there by the road. Never finished the 
story, either." 

Just then the train rushed around a bend Standards of 
in the track, and we came in sight of the Mis- 
souri River, looking stealthy and treacherous 
enough, with its white sand-bars showing 
grim and ghastly under the night mist, which 
a faint moonlight seemed to render more eerie 
than ever. The boy clapped his little hands 
together and exclaimed : 

"Oh, uncle, the river ! See the moon shining 
on those things in the water. What are they ? " 
83 



^ecoUections of a 

"Those are sand-bars/^ I replied. "And 
that is a very miserable sort of a river, any- 
way, my boy." 

"Yes/' said the brakeman. "I heard a man 
say t' other day that there was just two 
things God A'mighty did n't take no notice 
of. They were too wicked for him. One was 

City and the other the Missouri River. 

One touch ^^Say, little feller," taking the little lad in 

ofnaure ^^^ arms and lifting him on his lap, "come 
here to me an' lemme look at you. D' ye 
know, I had a little girl like you once ; same 
kind of eyes, and yeller hair, only 't was 
curly— an' fair complexion, too, just like him, 
preacher." 

"Where is she now?" asked the boy, look- 
ing interestedly at his new friend. 

"She 's dead, my boy. Gosh ! it 'most killed 
me, stranger. She took sick of a Tuesday, an' 
died a Wednesday." 

"I know somebody that 's dead," remarked 
the boy, gravely. 

"Do you, little feller ? Who may that be ? " 

"My mama," he replied. 

And we all looked at each other in silence, 

84 



'Missionary in tge Great West 

while the train sped on swiftly through the 
moonlight night. "One touch of nature makes 
the whole world kin." Is that touch a com- 
munity of sorrow, I wonder ? 

Speaking of little boys reminds me of an- An Episcopal 
other lad about whom a friend of mine told 
me. He belonged to a family who had trained 
him to believe in the deep-water form of bap- 
tism. Like the boy who tried it on the dog, 
he was experimenting with the household cat 
and a bucket of water. The animal evidently 
did not believe in immersion, for she re- 
sisted, bit, scratched and clawed and used bad 
language— in the cat tongue, of course. 
Finally the little boy, with his hands covered 
with scratches and with tears in his eyes, 
gave up the effort to effect the regeneration 
of the cat. 

"Dog-gone you !" he cried,— notice the nice 
choice of epithets in the use of the word 
"dog,"— "go and be an Episcopal cat if you 
want to ! " 

The way the women worked for the Church Vi et armis 

out West was a marvel. One old lady who 

85 



^ecoUecUons of a 

supported herself meagrely by the hardest 
kind of daily labor decided to raise the 
money for the west window of a little chapel 
we were building, and also to purchase an 
organ, herself. She was nearly threescore 
years old, yet, with indomitable spirit, she 
went from house to house and from farm to 
farm, walking five miles sometimes into the 
country, and being thankful to get ten cents 
for the purpose— ten cents, which often rep- 
resented a large sum of money to the poor 
farmer. 

The sturdy, fearless old woman asked every- 
body. She caught one wayfarer, who stepped 
off the train to get a breath of air at the sta- 
tion, and said she would hold him by the lapel 
of his coat until he gave her a dime, which he 
promptly did. One man offered her a nickel 
in response to her appeal, but she said it was 
against her principles to put down less than a 
dime upon her book, and if he could only 
afford to give her a nickel she would add five 
cents from her own funds and put it down as 
a dime from him, whereupon he immediately 
gave her a dollar. She succeeded in complet- 

86 



^f/liss'ionary in tge Great West 

ing both her undertakings in the end, and her 
chief happiness thereafter was to sit under the 
window and listen to the music of the organ. 

I was sitting on the steps of the church, An old gleaner 
feeling rather melancholy about our slow 
progress, one day, when I noticed the old 
woman coming around the corner with a large 
sack upon her shoulders. She was busily en- 
gaged in picking up bits of wood and chips 
from the wayside, staggering along under her 
burden. 

"Good gracious !^^ said I, "what on earth 
are you doing ? " 

"Oh," she said, "it is you, Mr. Brady? 
"Well, sir, I needed some kindling, and it just 
occurred to me if I could take my sack and 
go around those new buildings and gather up 
enough chips to equal a load of cobs, why, I 
could take the dollar and fifty cents, the cost 
of the cobs, and put it into the window fund. 
Don't you think that 's fair ? " 

I thought it was very fair. 



Speaking of music reminds me of the dififi- "^^ ^(^" ^''^^ 

the versatile 

culty we often had in getting people to sing voice 

87 



^ecoUections of a 

in the services. I have sung duets myself 
with the organist until the organist got tired 
and quit— for which I could hardly blame her, 
under the circumstances. And that reminds 
me of a man who was the possessor of the 
most versatile voice I ever had the pleasure 
of listening to, and his courage was as high as 
his voice was various. We were supposed to 
have a quartet choir in that mission, but if 
any of the singers happened to be absent it 
made no difference in the music, for the man 
with the comprehensive voice could and would 
sing any part. I have actually known him to 
sing the soprano solo of the anthem, and then 
immediately after sing the bass solo, carry a 
few bars of the alto part, and wind up with 
the chorus, all by himself ! 'T was nobly done, 
though the effect was startling, and the music 
never failed when he was there. 



A good word I spoke of the faithful work of the women. 

;or e men Qj^^^ :^^ ^ while we got hold of laymen who 
did equally good services. In fact, I know 
one church in which everything was done by 
the men, even to the cutting out of the red 

88 



'Missionary hi tge Great West 

hangings of the chancel, which they decorated 
with crosses cut out from yellow cloth, which 
they pasted, or fastened with tacks, to the 
other. The effect was good enough, though it 
was not embroidery. The men were the 
dominant factors in that mission, and it was 
one of the best in the diocese, never having a 
bit of trouble within its borders until the 
women took hold ! 

There was a lay reader who conducted ser- Stumbling over 
vices in another mission. He had been a stout 
old soldier in his day, and was a first-class 
man, but his knowledge of Hebrew was lim- 
ited, and his pronunciation of unfamiliar 
Bible names was a thing at which to marvel. 
When he opened the Bible on one occasion to 
read the lesson, he could not find the place, 
which was in one of the minor prophets,— 
great stumbling-blocks to more experienced 
men, by the way,— and after turning the 
pages nervously for some minutes in the 
face of a tittering congregation, he finally 
opened the book at random and began to 
read. As ill luck would have it, he lighted upon 
89 



3 Missionary in tge Great West 

one of the genealogical chapters in Ezra— 
the second. He struggled along through half 
a column of Hebrew names, and finally turned 
the last leaf in the hope that there would be 
a change in the substance of the chapter on 
the other side. What he saw proved too much 
for him, for after one frightened glance he 
closed the reading in this way : 

"And a page and a half more of the same 
kind, brethren. Here endeth the first lesson." 



90 







CHAPTER VI 



NE day I was seated in the station at ''Held up'' 
Medicine Lodge awaiting the train. I Spencer 



was reading intently, and was absorbed in 
my book, but I noticed a cow-boy walking 
about the room eying me, evidently desiring 
to be sociable. He finally stopped before me, 
saying : 

"Good mornin', stranger ; w'at mought you 
be a-doin' ? " 

"I am reading," I answered. 

"Wat are you readin' ? " 

"A book on evolution." 

"Wat 's evolution"? " he asked curiously. 

Herbert Spencer's famous definition was on 
the page before my eyes, and without a sec- 
ond's hesitation I read it off in the most 
rapid manner : 

"Evolution is an integration of matter and 
concomitant dissipation of motion, during 
which the matter passes from an indefinite, 
91 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent 
heterogeneity, during which the retained mo- 
tion undergoes a parallel transformation." 

The effect was startling. 

"My God ! " he cried. And then he stepped 
backward in his tracks, threw up his hands, 
gazed at me with astonished eyes, and, with 
jaws dropping in amazement, absolutely 
backed out of the room. I think this is the 
only instance on record of a cow-boy being 
"held up " by Herbert Spencer. 

A sand bliz- I left that town on the little rickety rail- 
road which was the tenuous link connecting 
it with civilization, just as a violent storm 
Avas arising. Before the train reached the 
junction point on the main line, a way -station 
which rejoiced in the utterly incongruous 
name of Attica, a fully developed sand-storm 
was raging through the country. It was mid- 
winter, and the thermometer dropped sud- 
denly as the whirling masses of dust and sand 
came sweeping down from the north over the 
bare prairie. 

It is impossible to describe adequately the 

92 



'Missionary in tge Great West 

thickness of the atmosphere. No object could 
have been discerned at a distance exceeding 
the width of an ordinary street, on account 
of the sand. The train was stalled in a cut 
near the station by the mass of sand, which filled 
the excavation almost up to the platforms of 
the cars, and the engine ^^died." To face the 
swirling mass for any length of time was to 
have one's face cut to pieces. It was impossi- 
ble to force an engine through the sand, and 
even a rotary snow-plow would have made no 
impression upon it whatever. There was 
nothing to be done but to abandon the train 
and wait for the abatement of the storm and 
then dig it out with shovels. 

The train-hands and the few passengers They called it 
made their way to a building, called by cour- 
tesy a hotel, which stood near the station. 
The sand-storm died away in the course of 
the afternoon, and was succeeded by a bliz- 
zard, so that the sand-heaps were covered by 
deep snow. Wires were down in every direc- 
tion and trains blockaded all over the State. 
The winter wheat had actually been blown 
out of the ground in many places. It was 
93 



^ecoUeciions of a 



Ventilation 
through the 
mop-board 



deathly cold. The landlord of the hotel, with 
his wife and children, occupied one room with 
a fire in it ; another was given to the women 
passengers of the train ; and that exhausted 
the tale of the rooms which were heated. 

The house was so old that I could push 
aside the mop-board and thrust my foot out 
into the air through the rotten weather 
boarding in the room which was allotted to 
me for sleeping. There were no blankets on 
the bed, which was of the variety known as 
"shuck." 

I lay down on the comfortable— singular 
misnomer !— with all my clothes on, including 
my shoes,— it was the first time I ever went to 
bed with my boots on,— and rolled myself up 
within its compass. But it was absolutely 
impossible to sleep, the cold was so intense ,• so 
a little after midnight I arose, went down to 
the office, and kindled a fire. I was joined 
presently by the rest of the men, who had been 
similarly accommodated. 
Out of it alive By the next morning the storm had died 
away, leaving the ground covered with snow, 
though the intense cold still continued. 

94 



']yiissionarY in tge Great West 

There was illness in my family, and as I was 
unable to communicate with them by tele- 
graph, I felt my presence at home was impera- 
tive. By dint of much persuasion and the 
expenditure of almost all the money I had, I 
succeeded in getting two horses and a sleigh 
with which to drive to the town, whence I 
hoped the railroad might be open. I was to 
leave the horses until called for. I reached 
the town all right, with one hand and part of 
my face frost-bitten, took the train, made an- 
other railroad connection, ran into a drift, 
tried it again, and after two other similar ex- 
periences reached my destination five days 
late. The family were all right when I got 
there. 

Snow blockades were frequent. I was on The Overland 
a freight-train, one winter morning, which 
pulled into a little siding to allow the Over- 
land Limited to pass and proceed on its way. 
There was a bit of woodland down the road, 
out of which the tracks sprang in a rather 
sharp curve. I stepped out of the caboose 
and stood on the little station platform to 
95 



'RecoUectlons of a 

watch the express-train go by. I always do 
that ; I like to see it. We could hear the 
roar of it a long distance over the prairie, 
coming nearer and nearer. Suddenly, like 
the thunderbolt itself, it darted out of the 
screen of woodland, whirled around the curve, 
and, rocking like a storm, made for the station. 
It passed by at a speed of more than fifty 
miles an hour— a great train of Pullman cars 
drawn by a splendid engine. It split the air 
like a flash of lightning. The ground fairly 
quivered under the weight of it. The roar in 
our ears was appalling. The dust swept by 
us as if from a cyclone. The eye had scarcely 
time to realize its approach before the concus- 
sion of its passage stopped the breath. Almost 
before the roar had died away it was gone. 

Such a splendid exhibition of applied power 
and science I have not often seen. As I stood 
there recovering my composure, a little drop 
of snow drifted softly down and rested gently 
upon my cheek. 
And its master "Ah," said I, as I felt the cold touch, look- 
ing after the train in vanishing perspective 
already far away, "this is that which masters 

96 



'Missionary in i^e Great West 

you." And before the night fell, that avalanche 
of steel, that modern embodiment of force and 
power, was lying quiet and helpless, its fires 
burnt out, its life gone, in the grasp of mil- 
lions of tiny little crystals like that which 
had just caressed my cheek. 

It was quite a diversion, when blockaded by Opening the 
snow, to get on the rotary plow at division 
headquarters and go out to open the road— to 
see the great white masses of snow in the cuts 
looming up before you in the moonlight j to 
push into it with the full strength and speed of 
the engine, and see it fly ; to back off and con- 
tinue the process until the way was clear. 

The roads ran through walls of corn in sum- 
mer and through walls of snow in winter. I 
know not which were the more beautiful. 

Speaking of division headquarters reminds A bicycle story 
me that one day, while I was waiting there to 
make a connection, a young man came into 
the station looking utterly broken in body 
and spirit. He was white, nervous, and shak- 
ing, and he was feebly pulling a bicycle after 
him. I happened to know him, for he was a 
97 



^ecoUections of a 

member of one of my mission stations up the 
State. 

It seems that he had taken his wheel to 
make a journey of several hundred miles to 
inspect some land in which he was interested. 
In the course of his journey he had crossed a 
very large prairie-field, which was broken 
about the middle by a high and unusual 
transverse ridge. When he had climbed the 
ridge and mounted his wheel to proceed, he 
noticed what the rise of ground had obscured 
from him— that the field was filled with Texas 
cattle grazing in little bunches of from ten to 
fifty. Just as he started, one or two of the 
"long-horns " caught sight of him. I presume, 
as it was years ago, the steers were not familiar 
with the machine in the country from which 
they came. One bunch followed its leader 
over to investigate. My young friend natu- 
rally accelerated his pace, whereupon the cat- 
tle took after him. Presently other bunches 
caught the contagion of the pursuit, and the 
cattle on that field indulged in a grand man- 
hunt. 

Fortunately the trail across it was straight 

98 



Missionary in t^e Great West 

and level and led directly to an immense gate. Chased by th 
The boy bent down over his wheel and ^'^''"^'^''''"^ 
pedalled for his life. He could hear the bel- 
lowing of the cattle and the tramping of their 
feet behind him, but he looked neither to the 
right nor the left. He had no idea what he 
should do when he reached the gate. All his 
mind was fixed upon one necessity— to keep 
ahead ! He thinks he gained a little upon 
them, and, as Providence would have it, as he 
neared the gate he saw that it was open. The 
road at that point took a sudden swerve, ran 
along parallel to the side of the enclosing 
wall, and then crossed the stockade through 
the heavy gate at a very acute angle. He 
dashed through the opening like a flash of 
lightning, lost his pedals as soon as he got out- 
side, darted along furiously for a short dis- 
tance, struck a rut or a rock, was pitched off, 
and lay senseless on the ground. 

The man who owned the range opportunely 
happened to visit it at that moment. He had 
seen the boy on the wheel, had opened the 
gate to let him pass through, and, with one or 
two attendants, had ridden in and headed off 
99 

Lcrc. 



UlecoUections of a 

the rushing cattle, else the lad would certainly 
have been killed. 



The just judge One of the men in one of my missions was a 
judge remarkable not only for his ability, but 
for his upright and rigid impartiality. A 
case was being tried before him in which the 
community were much interested. The pris- 
oner was very unpopular among the people, 
and every one was anxious that he should be 
convicted, though there was a strong doubt of 
his guilt. At the close of the trial, the prose- 
cuting attorney ended his address something 
like this ; 

"The people expect a conviction in this 
case, and they demand that the prisoner be 
found guilty and sentenced to the extreme 
penalty of the law. They will be satisfied 
with nothing else at the hands of the court 
and the jury." 

Whereupon the judge remarked gravely : 

"I know a case which happened long ago 

in an Eastern land, gentlemen, where the 

voice of the people was practically unanimous 

in demanding the execution of a prisoner, and 

100 



'Missionary in tge Great West 

they so worked on the feelings of the judge 
that he sentenced an innocent man! " 

It was, of course, necessary that I board Entertained by 
around, on my visits to different places. The "^'^^'^^^^'^"->'" 
hospitality of the people was always gener- 
ously and freely given— too generously some- 
times, in fact, for they frequently never left 
me a moment alone. Sometimes, after spend- 
ing the day with me, my hostess would excuse 
herself, upon the plea of urgent household de- 
mands, and say something to this effect : 

"But we won't allow you to get lonesome. 
Here 's little Johnny " (aged three) j "he will 
entertain you." Which meant that I was to 
play for the rest of the day with "little 
Johnny." I used to long for a chance to get 
"lonesome " some time. 

In one other particular the hospitality was Onthepreva- 

not enjoyable, and that was when the piece de ^chkkfn 

resistance of the menu was chicken. It seems 

to me that I have had chicken three times a 

day for a week at a time. This statement is 

probably incorrect as to facts, but it serves to 

101 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

show the impression left upon me after the 
years that have intervened. It was fre- 
quently presented to me with the remark 
that "preachers always liked it, especially 
the yellow-legged kind." Yellow-legged 
chickens, not preachers, be it understood. If 
anything could make chicken unpalatable to 
me beyond the mere fact that it was chicken, 
it would be the thought of the "yellow-legged 
kind." It seemed to me that I had chicken 
scrambled, fried, soft-boiled, and in every 
other possible shape. 
77?^ charge of Chicken to the right of me, chicken to the 
^ brigade^ left of me, chicken before me, chicken behind 
me ! Chicken, chicken everywhere, and not 
a drop to drink !— which is a mixture of met- 
aphors, or something ; but let it pass, as it 
was in a prohibition State ! I wondered 
sometimes that I did not turn into a chicken 
myself. I think I could write a feeling essay 
"On the Prevalence of Chicken in the Diocese 

of X ." Once in a while fortune was kind to 

me, and when I would make a visit to a new 
town they would have meat, whereupon I 
never failed elaborately to express my gratifi- 

102 



'^issionarY in tge Great West 

cation at the absence of chicken. The news 
would soon be disseminated among the people 
of the community, and chicken would be con- 
spicuous by its absence from every table where 
I was a guest in that town. But if I struck 
chicken on my first visit I had it forever after. 
When it was not chicken it was usually ham. 

I remember one little town I used to make One maid of 
in which a rather curious thing happened. I ^^u^^ 
was entertained, of course, at a different house 
on every visit. On my first visit I remarked 
that I did not drink coffee. (Since coming 
East I have learned to do so, with other bad 
habits I have acquired.) On my second visit 
my hostess remarked : 

"You do not drink coffee, I believe." 

"No," I said, "I do not." 

On my third visit, to another house, the 
same question and answer passed. I was 
more surprised, but said nothing until the 
conversation had been repeated five differ- 
ent times. Then I ventured to ask an ex- 
planation. When the remark was made I 
replied : 
103 



^ecoUectlons of a 

"No, I do not; but may I ask who told 
you?'^ 

"Mrs. Biggus," answered my hostess. 

"Who is Mrs. Biggus?" 

"Well," said the lady, waiting until the 
maid left the room, "she is the only woman 
whom we can secure for domestic service in 
the town. Everybody who entertains you 
has had her at the same time, to help while 
you were there. She knows what you like 
and has told every one." 

Mrs. Biggus and I met frequently after that 
at different houses, and became fast friends. 
She was a wise old woman, and always staved 
off the threatened chicken. 



Poi/ert/s inde- One day I was visiting a little mission where 

pendence . .-.,-, 

services were carried on by a lay reader. 

Just before the service a note was brought in 

asking prayers for a little Sunday-school 

scholar sick with typhoid fever. After the 

service the lay reader and I went over to the 

home of the little lad to see him. His 

mother, who had been deserted by a drunken 

husband, lived, with two little children, in a 

104 



]V[i6S]onarY m tge Great West 

two-roomed hovel— it would be an insult to 
architecture to call it a house. It was winter 
again, and the front room was cold. There was 
no fire in it, and the woman, with her children, 
was in the other room, the kitchen. 

The little lad, about six years old, in the 
last and lowest stages of typhoid fever, was 
lying upon an old dilapidated sofa. A little 
baby girl, about two years old, was dying of 
pneumonia on a soiled pillow on a rickety 
Boston rocker. The broken but uncomplain- 
ing woman sat between the two, the picture 
of despair, weeping the silent, bitter tears of 
ground-down poverty and sorrow. We did 
what we could to comfort her, and as we 
walked away I said to the lay reader that 
the children would undoubtedly die, and if 
he would let me know I would try to provide 
for their funeral expenses. 

"It is not necessary,'' he replied promptly. 
"My people, who are all poor like these, have 
contributed a little fund for just such emer- 
gencies as this. That woman there has never 
failed to make a weekly offering to that fund, 
and we need no outside help." 
105 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

Two generous Oh, the generosity of the poor! How it 
counts, and what it means to God and man ! I 
was preaching and asking for missionary 
money once before two different congrega- 
tions on the same day. The next day brought 
me two contributions. One was a check for 
one thousand dollars (this was in the East) 
from a noble and generous woman who was as 
kind as she was wealthy. The other was an 
assortment of petty coins, amounting to thirty 
cents, from a blind woman, an inmate of an 
eleemosynary institution, who had no income 
of any kind save what accrued to her from 
the sale of some useless articles of her own 
feeble handiwork, which she disposed of in- 
frequently to the curious who chanced to visit 
the home. This thirty cents was all she had 
made, all that she was likely to have for a 
long time. I valued the one gift no more 
than the other. 

No money in That was not the point of view of a certain 
the confirma- , -. i.- t ^ 

tion class treasurer of a congregation I once knew. 

The confirmation class which was presented 

to the bishop was a very large one, but most 

106 



'i^issionary m tge Great West 

of its members were young, and those who 
were not were i^oor. "Yes," said the treasurer, 
in response to the rather enthusiastic com- 
ment of the minister, "yes, it is a nice class, 
but I do not think we will rent any pews in 
it." The same man, speaking of an unusual 
congregation at an evening service, said to 
the same minister : "Yes, you are right ; it is a 
large congregation; but there is no money 
in it." 

I was preaching about missions another Hoist by my 

,. ^ , own petard 

time, urging the congregation to make some 

sacrifice for the missionary cause, and indicat- 
ing to them several methods by which they 
could follow my advice. Among other things, 
I suggested that they refrain from purchasing 
any book which they very much desired, and 
donate the money to me instead for my mis- 
sionary work. I happen to have perpetrated 
a book myself.* You will therefore under- 
stand my feelings when a very bright woman 
in the congregation came up to me and handed 
me a dollar, with this remark : 

* I have perpetrated several since then I 

107 



^ecoUections of a 

"I had intended to buy your book and read 
it, Mr. Brady, but I have concluded to follow 
your advice and give you the money for mis- 
sions instead." 

I accepted the situation gracefully and the 
money gratefully, and told her that I would 
lend her my own copy of the book to read. 
She smiled and thanked me, and as she did so 
I voiced my thought in this way : 

''But, after all, Mrs. E, , there does not 

seem to be any sacrifice on your part in this 
transaction, for you have the happy conscious- 
ness of having given the money, for missions, 
and yet have the book as well." 

"No sacrifice?" she replied. "Why, I 
have to read the book ! " 

Good for the Speaking of that book, a fine old clerical 



Sunday-school 
library 



friend of mine read it, and after complimenting 
me upon it, concluded his remarks as follows : 
"Well, Archdeacon, there are several 
' damns ' and a ' hell ' or two in that book of 
yours, but, after all, I thought it might well go 
into the parish library "—whether as a fright- 
ful example or not, he did not tell me. 

108 



]}/\lssionarY in iP}e Great West 

There is humor everywhere, even in so Revenue from 
. , , . . T , ,^ the graveyard 

staid and conservative a document as the 

journal of a diocesan convention, with its dry 

parochial statistics. One report I recall was 

accompanied by a note like this : 

^^The parish has added four acres to its 

graveyard, and hopes for a large increase in 

its revenue from that addition." 



109 



CHAPTER VII 

Profanity /^NE day on the 'Frisco road the engine 
\J broke down. It was a freight-train, and 
I was the only passenger ; consequently I went 
out and worked with the train crew, pulling 
and heaving and hauling with the rest. I 
knew something about the principles of me- 
chanics, and was familiar with the machine as 
well, being quite capable of running the 
engine myself, and was therefore able to ad- 
vise them to some purpose. The work was 
carried on under a vigorous and uninter- 
rupted flow of profanity, profusely and pic- 
turesquely weird in the highest degree. 

It was not so shocking as it might be under 
other circumstances, for I knew the men 
meant nothing by it— that it was only a mat- 
ter of habit with them, as it is with ninety 
people out of a hundred who are guilty of the 
same bad practice. Finally I suggested an 
interruption in the swearing, as I was a 

110 



3 Missionary in i^e Great West 

preacher. The head brakeman dropped his 
crowbar with a look of abject astonishment. 
Everybody else let go at the same time, and 
the engine settled down again. They looked 
at me in consternation, which was very 
amusing. 

"H~l and blazes!" said the conductor, 
"you are a what?" 

"A preacher," I replied. 

"Well, I ^m d— d!" he answered, with a 
long whistle of astonishment. 

He regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, A man, anyway 
and finally said, "Well, sir, you work like a 
man, anyway. Ketch hold again." 

"All right," I answered, smiling at his 
frankness j "but no more swearing on this 
trip." 

"N"oi)e," was the laconic reply. And the 
promise was kept. 

At the close of our manoeuvres, when we 
all stood panting but successful, the engineer 
remarked : "Well, it 's the first time I ever 
saw a preacher that knowed a reversinglever 
from a box-car before. Come up and ride 
with me the rest of the way." Aside from 
111 



^ecoUections of a 

his profanity, I found him a pleasant and in- 
teresting companion, and whenever I made 
the town at the end of his run, he never failed 
to come to church. 

An intenvga- On that same train, earlier in the day, I rode 
for a long distance alone with a living inter- 
rogation-point. As I am something of an in- 
terrogation-point myself, as far as regards men 
from whom I make a practice of constantly 
seeking to acquire information on the subjects 
they know, we clashed considerably. Just 
before he got off, he was speaking of some 
friend of his, and said in a very naive way : 

"Yes, John is a very different man from 
me. We ain't one bit alike, and John is one 
of the most honest men I ever knew." I was 
glad, after that statement, that he did not try 
to borrow a dollar from me before he left. 



The criticism Speaking of a most honest man reminds me 
of Oysamus 

of another old friend of mine, who rejoiced 

under the peculiar name of Orsamus Stocum. 

Once, when referring to a sermon he had 

heard me preach, he remarked that it was a 

112 



lyiissionary in tge Great West 

very good sermon, but ^'pretty middlin' long," 
and he thought I "must 'a' got awful tired 
preachin' it." 
I had. 

I did not always meet with pleasant recep- Warned to 
tions at new places, and I was warned on one 
occasion that no services were desired and 
that none would be permitted, and that if I 
consulted my own interests and the interests 
of peace and harmony, which I was supposed 
to promote, I would stay away. Of course, 
after that, nothing on earth could keep a man 
from going to just that place. 

On my arrival I was met by a large body 
of citizens who had no interest either in me 
or in religion, but who were determined to 
see fair play. They escorted me to a hotel, 
had secured a vacant store building, and were 
all ready for trouble if those whom they called 
the anti-religious faction desired to make any. 
In fact, I think they were thirsting for trouble. 
There were no women at services that night j 
nothing but men— and "guns." 

I did not feel particularly cheerful, but 
113 



^ecoUeciions of a 

managed to get through some way, and tried, 
somehow or other, to win over the opposing 
faction, so that in subsequent visits "guns " 
would be laid aside. But we had no trouble, 
and I managed to get hold of them all event- 
ually, so that my truculent escort was dis- 
pensed with in future visits, and the women 
came to church. 

Time to be in- When once you get the friendship of those 
troduced 

frontiersmen you are all right ; you can say 

anything to them. But they are so very hasty 
with their weapons that frequently you do 
not have an opportunity to get properly in- 
troduced. 

A Western Later, at this very town, I was present at a 
entertainment 

little entertainment given for the benefit of 

the church, and it was certainly entertaining. 

There were no programs, so, just before the 

curtain rose, an embarrassed young man came 

out on the stage and stated that there was to 

be a Queen of Fame who had a laurel wreath 

which she would award to the most correctly 

represented historical character present. He 

closed with this sentence : 

114 



llf/lissionary in tF^e Great West 

"The curtain will now raise^ then the char- 
acters come in, one by one, an' each particular 
character says what 's his or her particular 
claim to this here wreath." 

The curtain rose, the goddess appeared, and 
then the characters, particular and otherwise, 
made their appearance before her. It was 
indescribably funny. Izaak Walton was 
dressed in a pair of patent wading-boots and 
a cork helmet, Pocahontas flirting with a 
Japanese fan, Michelangelo in a bicycle suit 
and gray wig and beard, Xanthippe wear- 
ing a red cheese-cloth waist, tight-fitting, 
with apron and white mob-cap, and carrying 
a fire-shovel with which to coerce the unfortu- 
nate Socrates, who was gloomily enshrouded 
in an appropriate black domino. (N. B. The 
costumes were not meant to be burlesque ; 
and the whole thing was serious— very serious 
to the performers, and mainly so to the audi- 
ence—except to me.) 

Diogenes was wrapped in a Navajo 
blanket, Leif Ericson was dressed in an 
astonishing costume decorated with feathers 
and scalps, his feet covered with Indian moc- 
115 



^ecoUeciions of a 

casins, and a lady's white ruche tied around 
each ankle. Emma Abbott, Nilsson, and 
Jenny Lind each sang songs. Joan of Arc 
appeared in knickerbockers and boots, carry- 
ing the cover of a wash-boiler. Miriam led 
her Jewish maidens on deck, one of them 
merrily playing on a banjo ; and so on. 
The ' ' Halle- During the intermission, as this was profess- 

luj'ah Chorus ' ' 

on the trombone edly a ^'semi-religious " affair, the orchestra, 
which consisted of two fiddles and a horn, 
played an anthem, and finished with the ^'Hal- 
lelujah Chorus," the hallelujah portion being 
taken by the melancholy trombone. I said 
at the close that I had learned more in one 
brief evening than I ever thought possible ; I 
knew more about ancient costumes than ever 
before. 

A border town This is a description of one of the most 
primitive towns I ever ministered to, which 
I take from a letter written at the time : 

"It is a frontier cattle town of the kind 
you read about in dime novels — if you ever 
read any. It consists of one long, straggling 
street, lined on both sides with frame stores, 

116 



'^isslonarY in tge Great West 

saloons, and gambling dens, mostly unpainted. 
There are twelve saloons on the street and 
only about three hundred people in the town. 
Faro, keno, "craps," and every other kind of 
gambling games are going on at full blast and 
with no attempt at concealment. There 
every man you meet carries a "forty-five," i.e., 
a 45-caliber revolver, and a belt of cartridges 
at his waist. 

"I stayed at the Grand Central. The mag- 
nificence of the name and the comforts of the 
hotel are in an inverse ratio to each other. 
The rooms are tiny, and the partitions thin 
boards or canvas screens 5 therefore the con- 
versations are audible and forcible. I asked 
for toast last night at supper, and had the 
pleasure of hearing the cook inquire, ^What 

in does the dude preacher want 

toast at night for ? Tell him he can't have it. 
I ain't givin' out no toast to nobody at this 
hour.' If I had known how he would have 
taken it, I would have starved before I asked 
for it. 

"There is not a tree in the town, and no 
grass (I know places where not even the cot- 
117 



HecoUect'ions of a 

tonwood would grow, in spite of the fact that 
the ground around the trees for ten feet in 
every direction was ploughed up and watered 
regularly). The streets are as hard as iron j 
it has not rained for months. Water, how- 
ever, does not appear to be in demand. Very 
few drink it, and not many wash. 
I feel peaceable ^^The day before I arrived, three despera- 
does broke out of the jail after killing a guard, 
armed themselves, and fled. The sheriff and 
a posse made up of all the male citizens, and 
a few of the female, immediately started in 
pursuit, overtook them, fought them, killed 
two of them, and wounded another desper- 
ately. One of the deputy sheriffs had his arm 
blown off in the fight. This was looked upon 
as quite an ordinary affair, exciting little com- 
ment, and only elicited a brief notice in the 
weekly newspaper, with a significant warning 
to the rest of the prisoners in the jail to stay 
there until they were released. I should 
think they would stay. I never felt so peace- 
able in my life. I really have no desire to 
quarrel with any one. 

^^The church is an unceiled, unsheathed 

118 



lyiissionary in i^e Great West 

wooden building, unpainted also, the only a relief from 
churcli in town. Everybody nearly comes to ^^'^ 
churcli to services. They look upon it as an 
intellectual diversion perhaps, and as a relief 
from the monotony of faro, at which they al- 
ways lose. This morning, while waiting for 
service time, I stood in the big ^general 
store' and watched the scene. It struck me 
as something incongruous to see a six-foot 
man, bearded like the pard, with a mustache 
fierce enough for Don Cesar de Bazan, with a 
red flannel shirt on, and armed with the usual 
forty-five, selling baby clothes. It amused me 
inwardly, but I assure you I was grave out- 
wardly. As I stood by and watched the 
transaction, I would not have expressed my 
real feelings for the whole store. Most of the 
clerks are as piratical-looking as the one 
mentioned, and most of the customers ditto. 

"There was a street-fight this morning be- 
tween two ruifians about a claim, in which one 
was badly used up. The monotony of the 
landscape was also broken by the attempt of 
a famous ^ buck -jumper ' to conquer an equally 
famous bronco. The man finally won, but it 
119 



^ecoUeciions of a 

was after a struggle which almost beggars de- 
scription. 
Livelier on ^^They tell me that it is very quiet here, and 
that I should see the ^city' on Saturday and 
Sunday, when the boys are in from the range. 
Heaven forbid ! It has been bitter cold all 
day and night, and is about 100^ this morning. 
The wind blew a simoon from the south all 
day Thursday, and it was as hot as ^India's 
coral strand.' On Friday a norther swept 
down upon us, and the temperature makes 
one think of ^Greenland's icy mountains.' 
The inhabitants themselves remind me of 
another line of that old missionary hymn. 
We know not what the weather will be later 
on ; it has not yet developed. Many of the 
inhabitants live in dugouts, some in sod 
houses, with here and there a lonesome, star- 
ing, ambitious, wretched little ^ Queen Anne 
cottage,' unpainted." 

This did not seem a very promising field 
for the Church, yet we subsequently succeeded 
in establishing services, and now the mission 
is thriving and the character of the town is 
entirely changed. 

120 



Missionary In tge Great West 

One of my Sunday circuits necessitated a Doubling the 
start from my home at one o'clock on Satur- ^^rrf 
day afternoon. By continuous travelling I 
would reach my first point at seven o'clock 
Sunday morning. Services were at half-past 
seven in a pretty little farm church several 
miles from the station, built right out in the 
fields. 

This church was afterwards destroyed by a 
cyclone. The farmers who made up the con- 
gregation had no money, but they had land, 
and they each one of them planted one acre 
of their best land in wheat, which was to be 
harvested and sold for the new church. The 
crops failed, l^ext year they planted two 
acres. The crops failed again. And the third 
year they planted three acres, and had a fine 
harvest, the proceeds of which they reli- 
giously set aside for the new church building 
fund, which presently enabled them to replace 
the wrecked building. Such perseverance I 
have not often seen. Every time they lost 
they doubled the stakes on the Lord's side 
till they won. 

After that early service, which, be it re- 
121 



^ecoUeciions of a 

A door-keeper membered, they only had once in about five 
the ^Lord ^^ ^ix weeks, I drove or rode to a little town 
nine miles away. The church people in that 
town were of a different sort, and I frequently 
had to sweep and dust out the building, and 
in winter kindle the fire myself, besides ring- 
ing the church bell, which was a very large 
hand affair, such as auctioneers or small res- 
taurant-keepers use. I have often stood on 
the street and swung that bell until I could 
gather some sort of a congregation. This was 
only at first, however, for later the people 
waked up and did what was proper. 

Hustling times When that service was over, I would get a 
lunch packed in a little basket. At first I 
had it packed at a hotel, but afterwards the 
people did it for me, and very nice lunches 
they were. Armed with my little basket, I 
would drive twelve miles to another town, 
holding a service there about two o'clock, 
after which I would take the afternoon train 
for my fourth station and service at night. 
Sometimes— not always, but almost every 
other time— I would have to ride between 
twenty and thirty miles to catch another train, 

122 



'Missionary m tF}e Great West 

and this would compel me to get up about two 
o'clock in the morning. Those were hustling 
times ! 

Though an Eastern man, I learned to hustle Too Western 
with the rest— so much so, in fact, that I 
have never been able to get out of the habit, 
and I was recently told, therefore, that I was 
"too Western for a civilized diocese." 

Speaking of lunches put up for me, nothing "Scrapple'' 
could exceed the generosity of the people ^^'^mikT^^ 
with what they had. I used to reach home 
generally feeling and looking like a truck- 
wagon. Pots of jam, the omnipresent pre- 
serves (they were worse on preserves out 
there than a New-Englander is with his pie), 
jars of pickled onions, fruit, loaves of home- 
made bread— I carried them all home. 

But my crowning achievement was the 
transportation of several pounds of "scrapple " 
for five days over a thousand miles of country. 
There was only one place in eighty thousand 
square miles of territory in which that delec- 
table compound was made, by an old Pennsyl- 
123 



^ecoUections of a 

vania friend of mine, and I was determined 
to get it home. I succeeded, but the oleagi- 
nous concoction ruined my ^^grip " ! 

Peripatetic One of the churches I mentioned a moment 
c urc es ^]jiGQ had been built by an English farm col- 
ony, which, as its members knew nothing of 
farming, came quickly to grief. The pretty 
little building stood alone on the prairie, ut- 
terly useless. One fine day we raised it on 
wheels, hitched teams to it, and hauled it 
some twenty miles over the prairie (fortu- 
nately there were no watercourses interven- 
ing) to a little town, where it found a perma- 
nent abiding-place and did good service. 

We often moved church buildings over the 
country, following the people after "busted 
booms " had forced them into other localities. 

Breaking up When I stayed longer than an hour or two 



the ground 



in any place, I always told the people to have 
as many services as they liked— that I would 
conduct them and preach at all of them. As 
many of them only had services when I would 
come to them, once every six weeks or so, 

124 



'^'isslonarY in iF}e Great West 

tliey often availed themselves of my permis- 
sion, and sometimes astonished me by the 
number of occasions for preaching and ser- 
vices that were invented. 

After I had succeeded in working up two 
or three missions in any neighborhood to a 
partially self-supporting basis, the bishop 
would get a little money from the East, and 
add to it what the people could provide, and 
we would put a resident missionary in the 
field. In fact, that was my chief duty. I was 
only to break up the ground and prepare the 
way— a sort of ecclesiastical pioneer. But 
there were some places which were too poor 
or too far away ever to be combined, and these 
I took care of all the time. 

Train robberies and bank robberies were fre- Tram robberies 
quent ; we were used to them. I remember, 
the wife and daughter of a friend of mine, an 
army ofi&cer stationed on the frontier, were 
going East. As the train started out of Chi- 
cago they heard sounds like pistol-shots from 
the roadside. The woman and her daughter 
immediately dropped to the floor between the 
125 



^ecoUectlons of a 

seats of the Pullman, and crouched down, re- 
maining thus concealed until they saw they 
were attracting a great deal of attention from 
the amused passengers. When they were 
asked for an explanation of their singular 
conduct, they could only say that they thought 
that it was a "hold-up " of the train, and they 
were doing as they had been taught. 
The Dalton I was at Coffey ville a day or two after the 
famous raid by the Daltons, in which all the 
raiders were killed except one, who was des- 
perately wounded and captured. In the 
action several of the citizens lost their lives 
as well. The town for months after was in a 
state of siege. Every man had a Win- 
chester in his of&ce or store, and it was 
almost as much as his life was worth for a 
suspicious character to enter a bank. Kevol- 
vers were sprinkled everywhere. 

Dying ^ame In one little town, where there was but 
one bank, two men rode into the town in the 
morning, walked into the bank, shot the pres- 
ident dead, mortally wounded the cashier— 
the clerk, fortunately for him, being at the 

126 



l^lssionary m tf)e Great West 

post-office. The men seized all the available 
cash inside the counter and rode off. They 
were immediately pursued by the citizens, led 
by the city marshal. 

The robbers, hard pressed, took shelter in 
a '^cooley," or gully. They had chosen a 
strong position for defence, and had put one 
or two bullets into some careless and reckless 
citizens before they were discovered. The 
cooley, which was a very short one filled 
with dry wood and underbrush, was im- 
mediately surrounded by the posse. After 
a consultation they sent back to town for 
several barrels of oil, which they poured 
down the ravine from the hill, or the inside 
end, and then set fire to the mass. The bank 
robbers stood it as long as they could, and 
came staggering out of the opening, blinded 
by the smoke, firing irregularly. They 
wounded one man, but were promptly lassoed 
and deprived of their weapons. Trial was 
dispensed with, and the prisoners were 
mounted on the tail of a wagon, a noose was 
cast about each man's neck, and the ends of the 
ropes fastened to the limb of a stumpy tree. 
127 



3 '^IssionarY in tF}e Great West 

"Got anything to say before you die?" 
asked the marshal, grimly. 

"Nothiny said the leader of the band of 
two, a boy of twenty-one years of age. "We 
did it. I shot the cashier myself. We '11 
show you that we ain't afraid of you. We 
only want you to tell the boys that we died 
game." 

"We '11 do it," said the marshal, apprecia- 
tively. "Get up," he laconically shouted to 
the bronco ; and that was all. 

That was the town in which I buried the 
Daughter of the King of whom I told you. 



128 



T 



CHAPTER VIII 



O turn to lighter themes, I had a wedding The only kid 
one day at another frontier town. There ^ Territory^ 



was no church there, and as we sat waiting 
for the bride and groom to come into the 
parlor, some of the men present began giving 
personal reminiscences of their own weddings, 
one man speaking thus : 

"When I was married, nothin' would do 
my ol' woman but that I must have a pair of 
white kids. She 'd been raised right, back 
East, an' she knowed they was the proper 
thing. Kids on them things, boys ! " he said, 
bursting into deep laughter, and exhibiting a 
pair of red hands that would have consorted 
well with the physique of a Samson. "Just 
think of it ! But I sent East for 'em, an' got 
'em, too. It took some time, an' we had to 
put off the weddin', for they had to be made 
a special size. An' when the weddin' night 
come, I worked for an hour gettin' 'em on, 
129 



UecoUeciions of a 

busted ^em to pieces before I got tlirough, an' 
gosli ! I sweat like a roped steer. But my wife 
she said, ragged or not ragged, it was the 
finest weddin' in the Territory, 'cause nobody 
had never been married in kids there before." 
The bride balks The bride, who was a head taller than the 
^yw groom, was a bold, vigorous, red-faced, mas- 
culine-looking woman, while the groom was a 
rather timid, sallow little man. She said she 
was twenty-two and he was twenty-one. It 
was midsummer, and as they stood under the 
hanging lamp the perspiration poured off the 
bride's face in streams. When we came to 
that part of the service in which the woman 
promises to obey her husband to be, there 
was a pause. The big bride looked down on 
the little groom, and evidently felt the in- 
congruity of the situation. 

^' Can't you let that pass, parson?" she 
whispered pleadingly. 

I was inexorable, however, so she finally 
complied with the requirements, but with an 
exceedingly bad grace, and we finished the 
service. 

I think the company were all surprised 

130 



'Missionary in t^e Great West 

that I did not kiss the bride. But I remem- 
bered a story told me by another missionary, 
to the effect that on a similar occasion he did 
kiss the bride, whereupon the husband be- 
came abusive and threatened him, at which 
the lady promptly interfered. Laying aside 
her bridal veil and catching her husband by 
the shoulder, she shook him vigorously, re- 
marking at the same time that she "did n't 
allow no man to interfere with her religious 
privileges, even if he was married to her ! " 



Her religious 
privileges 



At a wedding rehearsal once the groom, not 
usually an ornament, though a necessary 
appanage, was wondering where he should 
go and what he should do. "Oh,'^ said the 
best man, "nobody cares what you do and 
where you go ! " His intended simpered, 
looked longingly at him, smiled weakly, and 
remarked boldly, "The bride cares.^^ 



The bride 
cares ' ' 



Occasionally I attended other weddings. The Hard on Epis- 
first time I did so I happened to sit by a ^^^^ ^^"^ 
very bright woman, who said to me, when I 
remarked that this was the first wedding I 
131 



^ecoUections of a 

had ever seen outside of an Episcopal Church, 
^'Oh, you Episcopalians never see anything 
outside of your own Church, anyway ! '^ 

She was the mother of a delicious little tot 
who concluded her baby prayers in this origi- 
nal way : "And please, God, take care of 
everybody ; and O God, take care of Your- 
self, for You know You are the Boss of us all." 



Indomitable There was a little town which I will call X , 

women ^i^gre they had built a nice little church and 
rectory. Just as they fancied themselves on 
secure foundation, trouble began. Two of 
the vestrymen quarrelled over the wife of 
another, and one of the combatants shot the 
other dead on the public street. The mur- 
derer is now serving a life sentence in the peni- 
tentiary (capital punishment not being the 
custom in that commonwealth) for his crime, 
and the woman has gone I know not where. 
This was a staggering blow for the little 
church, and it was followed by another ; for 
the building was shortly afterwards destroyed 
by a cyclone,— which wiped out about one half 

132 



]}/[iS6ionarY in tge Great West 

of the town, by the way,— and they had no in- 
surance. 

There were but two or three men left, 
and a dozen women and some children, who 
remained connected with the mission. They 
had no services except very occasional ones 
from me, yet they immediately began to raise 
money for another church building. One of 
the men still in connection with the mission 
was a banker. By hard work the women had 
raised some three hundred dollars, which had 
been deposited in the bank of this man. In 
one of the seasons of panic the bank failed 
and they lost everything. 

It will hardly be believed, but these indom- 
itable women, with no men to help them this 
time, began their efforts again— efforts which 
have finally been crowned with well-deserved 
success. This is the kind of stuff the peo- 
ple are made of out there. It requires the 
most unbounded enthusiasm and determina- 
tion, the most unyielding perseverance and 
courage, to be a pioneer in anything, whether 
it be breaking up a farm or establishing a 
church. 
133 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

An Irish bull It was in that town that I attended a union 
meeting in which one of the ministers began 
his prayer with words of thanksgiving for the 
"thoughts thunk to-night." And it was near 
that place, also, that I was delivering an ad- 
dress before a body of old soldiers, when I 
was greeted with roars of laughter, the cause 
of which I was ignorant of until I was told by 
friends that I had gravely announced myself 
as "the son of a soldier father and the daugh- 
ter of a soldier mother." 

Why the Lot- People were not always faithful to the 
/ailed Church, however, for I remember one little 
town which had been more or less abandoned 
for twelve years. I could not find a single 
member of the Church left, except one old lady 
who had been bedridden for a number of years. 
"Yes," she said, in answer to my inquiry, 
"I am still a member of the Episcopal Church, 
I reckon. We did have about a dozen mem- 
bers once. There was—" and she called over 
a number of names. 

I interrupted her in each case by asking 
what had become of the person mentioned. 

134 



^VHssionary in t^e Great West 

"^he 's joined the Latter-day Saints/^ was 
the answer, when the subject of my question 
had neither removed nor died. 

"It seems to me that everybody has joined 
the Latter-day Saints," I commented. 

"Yes," she replied, " 'most every one. 
They had a revival here, and got them all 
except me." 

"Why did n't they get you? " I asked. 

"I reckon because I was bedridden and 
could not get out where they could get at 
me," she answered frankly. 

One day the bishop inadvertently sent two The rivals 
clergymen to conduct services and preach in 
a certain church at the same time on Sunday 
morning. Both were very old men, and each 
one was fond of preaching. As they were on 
the retired list, they did not have frequent 
opportunities for doing so. Each was much 
surprised to see the other at the church. 
They had no difficulty, however, in dividing 
the services between them, but the question 
as to who was to preach was a harder prob- 
lem. Each man had made up his mind that 
135 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

he would do the preaching and the other 
should not enjoy the opportunity. 

The services went on smoothly enough until 
the singing of the last verse of the hymn 
which comes before the sermon. During the 
singing the younger of the venerable brethren 
stepped out from his seat and openly knelt 
down in the sight of everybody for his pre- 
liminary prayer, which he concluded in much 
less time than usual, lest he should be caught 
napping, and then he rose and turned to the 
X)ulpit. 

The older man for the nonce had dispensed 
with his private prayers, and as soon as his 
brother cleric had knelt down, he had 
promptly walked into the pulpit. As the 
younger preacher stood looking at his rival 
in open-mouthed astonishment and consterna- 
tion, the old man bowed gracefully to him, 
and turning to the congregation, triumphantly 
began his sermon. 

Lost identity From old men to children is a long step to 
take. I had one little friend who was devot- 
edly attached to my son, and he never suc- 

136 



l^iss'ionary in t^e Great West 

ceeded in referring to me in any other way 
than as "Mr. Brady's little boy's papa." 

I came home from church late one evening, Said them to 
and found my wife seated on the porch. I 
was met with the request that I go up-stairs 
and straighten out the children, who had been 
sent to bed long since, but had not gone to 
sleep. I found one of them lying on the bed, 
her feet drawn up and concealed in her night- 
gown, and the other sitting in a constrained 
position on the floor, in the same way. 

"What 's all the trouble?" I asked. 

"Sister won't say her prayers," remarked 
the boy. 

"I did say them," answered the little girl, 
promptly. 

"Well, you did n't say them to me," he 
persisted. 

"I said them to God," she replied trium- 
phantly, "and you did n't say yours to 
anybody." 

"She 's gone to bed with her clothes on," 
retorted the little boy, attempting to get back 
on account of this master stroke. 
137 



^ecolCections of a 

"So 's he/' replied the girl. 

I examined them, and found that they had 
slipped their nightgowns on over their 
clothes ; and when I asked the reason why, I 
learned that each had refused to "unbutton" 
the other on account of the difficulty about 
the saying of prayers. It was a theological 
problem which I found it not easy to 
unravel. 

Wisdom bom It was another little boy of my acquaintance 
of experience ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^.^ mother, when she was about to 

chastise him upon that part of his anatomy 
especially appointed for the purpose : 

"Oh, mamma, won't you please distribute 
it a littler' 

/ wish it were There was a certain little girl who belonged 
to a Sunday-school class in a far-away prairie 
village. When I visited the mission, I heard 
several of the little girls recite the catechism. 
Afterwards I baptized some of them, and then 
invested each one of them with a little silver 
cross, made them a pleasant little speech, and 
finished by giving each one of them a kiss. 

138 



true 



^issJonarY m tfje Great West 

After I had left the town, their teacher was 
telling them about crosses in general, and the 
sign of the cross in baptism in particular. 

"Yes, children," she said, "as long as you 
are good that cross the archdeacon made on 
your forehead shines brightly, and Jesus sees 
it ; but when you are not good it grows dim, 
and if you continue to be very bad it finally 
fades away." 

"My ! " said one sweet little miss, "you can 
almost see the cross on Mr. Brady's forehead 
now yourself, can't you?" 

I think I have never received such a genu- 
ine, if utterly undeserved, compliment, nor 
one that touched me more. 

From children to lunatics is another long The biggest 
backward leap. I remember a clerical friend ^^^ ^au^ 
of mine who was visiting an old schoolmate 
who happened to be the curator of a lunatic 
asylum. As a special favor my friend was 
taken by his friend into that portion of the 
asylum in which the dangerous cases were 
kept, and to which ordinary visitors were not 
allowed access. He was instructed before 
139 



Recollections of a 

entering the different cells as to the nature of 
each case, and told what he must do. He was 
informed, before one door, that the man he 
was about to see was only violent when he 
was disagreedwith,— many men who are pop- 
ularly supposed to be entirely sane are simi- 
larly affected, especially husbands,— and that 
he must acquiesce in everything that was said, 
under penalty of fearful possibilities. He 
promised faithfully so to do. 

The lunatic, who was a rather nice-looking 
old man, apparently perfectly sane, entered 
upon a conversation with the clergyman at 
once. He surprised the minister by re- 
marking : 

"I suppose you saw that President Cleve- 
land had been impeached, the other day, for 
stealing ? " 

"Yes," was the reply, very faintly delivered. 

"What a pity it is that the Washington 
Monument was blown up by dynamite by the 
strikers, the other day, is n't it?" was the 
next question. 

"An awful pity," said the perspiring 
clergyman. 

140 



^yiissionary m tfie Great West 

"And I am so glad that the Queen of Eng- 
land is dead, so she can give her son a chance 
to reign ; are n't you? " continued the old man. 

" YeSj yes, certainly ; it was time for her to 
die," the clergyman answered desperately. 

The old man stopped, looked earnestly at 
his embarrassed visitor, and remarked 
suavely : 

"Did n't you say you were a clergyman, 
when you came here ? " 

"Yes," said our friend, brightly— it was the 
only truthful thing he had had an opportu- 
nity to say during the interview. He was 
astonished, however, when the lunatic said 
quietly : 

"Well, sir, for a preacher you are the big- 
gest liar I ever saw.'^ 

Tableau, 

Speaking of liars reminds me of a little in- Ananias in a 

• J J. mi i. • • 4- • "^^ version 

cident. There was a certain man m a certain 

mission who rarely ever contributed any- 
thing to the support of the mission. There 
are many similar men in all missions. He 
always sat in the rear of the church, and 
141 



'^RecoUeci'ions of a 

nobody knew of his practice except the 
man who took np the collection. He told 
me. The warden was rather long in receiv- 
ing the offering one day, and I turned around 
to see what was the matter. It happened 
that the man had come in very late, and be- 
fore he knew it the usher had placed him 
upon the front seat. My eye and his eye and 
the alms-basin all struck the same point at 
the same time. As usual, he put nothing in 
it, but, not as usual, he blushed violently when 
he saw that I had noticed it. 

The next day I went to his dry-goods store 
to buy something. My purchase amounted 
to a dollar or two. I paid for it, started away 
with it, and then recollected that I had been 
told to get another spool of thread, or some- 
thing of that kind, the cost of which was about 
ten cents. He tied up the new parcel for me, 
and when I handed him the money, he pushed 
it back with a wave a la Podsnap, and this 
remark : 

^'I happened to be caught in an embarrass- 
ing situation yesterday morning in church" 
(which was true). ^'I forgot to bring my 

J42 



]\/lissionarY m tf)e Great West 

usual collection" (which was not true), ^^so I 
want to donate this little spool of thread as 
an offering to the Lord ! " 

The next time I came to that town I 
preached on Ananias and Sapphira, and the 
man did not come back to church for six 
months. 



143 



CHAPTER IX 

Jaw-breaking T^ECREATION and instruction are com- 
J-V) bined in a very effective way in the 
great Chautauqua assemblies which are held in 
the West, and which seem to find a more con- 
genial environment there than in the East. 
Some of the ablest addresses, the finest ser- 
mons, the most interesting lectures, I have 
ever heard have been delivered at these as- 
semblies. They are attended by whole fami- 
lies, but of course crowds of young people 
predominate. A local druggist in a town 
near which one of the principal assemblies 
used to meet remarked to me, one day, that he 
had made every preparation for the coming 
Chautauqua, and was ready for it. He was 
not of a literary turn of mind, and as I was 
curious CO know, I asked him what his prepa- 
rations consisted of. 

"Doctor," he replied impressively, "I have 
laid in six thousand pieces of chewing-gum ! " 

144 



g 'lyiissionary in tge Great West 

I think he sold them all before the session 
closed. I suppose that chewing-gum was con- 
sidered an aid to meditation. The maxillary 
motion seems to have a stimulating effect on 
the mind. 

That reminds me of a clerical friend of mine Unconscious 

cerebration 
who had a fatal fluency m speech. His ser- 
mons were torrents of verbosity. He was 
asked how he managed it. 

"Why," he replied gravely, "I get my 
mind fixed upon a subject, and then I just un- 
consciously cerebrate and keep my jaws mov- 
ing." I think that chewing-gum would have 
been an assistance to him. A sense of humor, 
too, would have helped him. 

Speaking of cerebration reminds me of an The chinch-bus^ 

achievement performed by a scientific little 

giant well known and loved throughout the 

West for his successful grappling with the 

chinch-bug problem. I suppose there are 

millions of people who have never heard of 

the chinch-bug. On the other hand, there are 

several millions who know him intimately to 

145 



l^ecoUections of a 

their very great sorrow. The vicious little 
insect, which the Century Dictionary calls a 
"certain fetid American hemipterous insect 
of the genus BUssiis,^^ is a little bug about an 
eighth of an inch long, grayish black in color, 
with white markings. They literally swarm 
in the wheat- and corn-fields by the millions. 
They crawl through a field with remarkable 
rapidity, and the line of their devastating ad- 
vance is as clearly marked as if the grain was 
being cut by a machine. For a long time the 
farmers were helpless before their attack. 
A triumph of Dr. Francis H. Snow, the chancellor of the 
University of Kansas, an entomologist of 
world-wide reputation (that is, he is known 
everywhere except in the East, where there are 
no chinch-bugs), after a long course of brilliant 
experiments, discovered the method of inocu- 
lating the bug with a deadly and very conta- 
gious disease ; he also discovered the disease. 
He then conceived the brilliant idea of dis- 
tributing a few of the inoculated insects in a 
field where the destroying armies had made 
their appearance, and, wonderful to relate, the 
experiment proved to be a great success. An 

146 



l^issionary m t^e Great West 

epidemic of disease, superinduced by the few 
inoculated insects, swept through the chinch- 
bugs and saved that particular crop. His 
work, which comprised not only the discovery 
of the disease, but the method of artificial in- 
oculation and propagation, and the preserva- 
tion of the inoculated bugs during the long 
winter season, so that he might have a supply 
on hand with which to begin the summer 
campaign, was one of the most beneficial of 
the gifts of science to the welfare of humanity. 

The money value of property saved by his 
labors, freely and ungrudgingly given, 
amounts to millions of dollars— an enormous 
sum. The experiments of several years have 
shown that upward of seventy per cent, of 
the fields operated upon have been saved, and 
the cases of failure are due to local causes 
which are beyond control. During the busy 
season the farmers send in boxes of live bugs 
to the university, and receive in return, by 
mail, a sufficient number of the inoculated in- 
sects to do the work. 

A field in the grasp of the chinch-bugs is a Devastation 
horrible sight. Where they have been the 
147 



'RecoUectlons of a 

stalks wither and rot, and the inevitableness 
of their rapid attack upon the remainder of 
the field covered with tufted heads of wheat 
or broad corn-leaves waving in the breeze, is 
a painful si)ectacle. If you examine the line 
of attack closely you will see that each stalk 
is fairly blanketed with these loathsome little 
pests, sucking the life-blood out of it. A great 
big corn-stalk, shivering under the drain of 
these insects, looks like a human being in 
agony. 

A rash offer There was a man once, in a little town I 
visited, who kept a general store. He was 
approached one morning by a farmer who 
was indebted to him in some small amount, 
with a request for an extension of time, on the 
plea that the chinch-bugs were in the farmer's 
corn and that his crop was being ruined. 

"Chinch-bugs ! Konsense ! " exclaimed the 
storekeeper, rudely. "I don't believe there 
is a chinch-bug within a mile of your field." 
"They are there by millions, I tell you.'' 
"Millions ! " cried the storekeeper, incredu- 
lously. "I '11 tell you what I '11 do. I '11 

148 



'^iss'ionary m tge Great West 

give you a dollar aod a half a gallon for every 
gallon of the bugs you bring in to me." 

"Done ! " replied the debtor. 

There were several witnesses to the bargain, 
and without saying a word the farmer turned 
and walked out. A day or two after he drove 
back to the village with a large ten-gallon 
can,* tightly covered, which he unloaded from 
his wagon and rolled carefully into the gen- 
eral store. There were the usual number of 
country idlers in the store at the time, who 
were interested witnesses of the conversation 
that ensued. 

"What nave you there?" asked the mer- 
chant, suspiciously. 

"Something for you." 

"What is it?" 

"Chinch-bugs," answered the farmer, calmly 
lifting the lid and showing the can, completely 
filled with a horrible mass of the hideous in- 
sects, tumbling and wriggling like mad. 

"There 's ten gallon of them," he continued, 
"and I take it that you owe me fifteen dollars 

*I tliink it was ten gallons, but if I have made any mistake I 
have understated the quantity. 

149 



^ecoUectlons of a 

for the lot. That will just about square my 
little bill, and I will thank you to give me a 
receipt for it." 

"Cover it up quick, for goodness' sake, be- 
fore any of them get away," hastily remarked 
the astonished shopman, amid the uproarious 
laughter of the bystanders. 

Then, after asking if the contents clear 
through were in accordance with the top 
layer, and receiving an affirmative answer, 
declining a suggestion that he could examine 
the case and see for himself, the merchant 
went back and gravely wrote out the receipt. 
That was all the farmer got out of his wheat- 
field that year, too. 
Quotations on The story was too good to keep. It got 
into the local papers, and was quoted all over 
the State. Every mail brought letters of in- 
quiry to the unfortunate shopkeeper, asking 
for his latest quotation on chinch-bugs, and 
whether he paid the freight or wanted them 
delivered F. O. B., how he would have them 
shipped, and so on. He was dismayed at first, 
but he said afterwards that he believed that 
he had received a thousand dollars' worth of 

150 



the bugs 



l^lssionary m tge Great West 

free advertising out of the incident, so lie was 
content. The farmer had simply taken his 
boys into the fields with tin cans, and they 
had stripped stalk after stalk, and had no 
difaculty in getting the amount that they 
brought in. It is not safe to make statements 
without considering the consequences. 

I have heard of an eminent bishop, a Southern A ten-thousand- 
dollar joke 
bishop renowned for his wit, who came IN orth, 

shortly after the close of the War of the Re- 
bellion, to get some money to carry on the 
missionary work of his sadly shattered diocese. 
He had succeeded in securing a tentative 
promise of ten thousand dollars from a certain 
wealthy individual with whom he was to dine 
that evening, in company with a number of 
other guests. One of the company, with in- 
credible rudeness, asked the bishop, during 
the course of the dinner, how they felt down 
South at being ^4icked." I think he must 
have been drinking. The bishop, like the 
gentleman he was, parried the question ; but 
the questioner persisted in his desire, and at- 
tracted the attention, finally, of the whole 
151 



'RecoUections of a 

table to his query. The bishop was human,— 
most bishops who are worth anything are,— 
and he finally lost his temper. 

^'You ask me, my young friend, how we 
feel down South at having been, as you say, 
licked?" he said with urbane courtesy. 

^^Yes, sir." 

^'Well, sir, I will tell you. We feel like 
Lazarus." 

^' Like Lazarus, eh? Pretty poor? Asking 
for crumbs?" replied the other, chuckling at 
his own humor. 

"No, sir," answered the bishop ; "I do not 
refer to that phase of his character." 

"What, then?" 

"Why, Lazarus was licked by a dog, sir. 
We can sympathize with him, sir ! " 

It was a brilliant and well-deserved bit of 
repartee, but it lost the bishop his ten thou- 
sand dollars. If I had been the intending 
donor I think I would have given him twenty 
thousand dollars for his pluck and his wit. 

Following the Speaking of bishops reminds me of another 
bishop s or er i^-^j^^p ^^^ ^^ entertaining a modest young 

152 



'Missionary in tge Great West 

friend of his from the country at a hotel con- 
ducted on the European plan. The bishop was 
suffering from indigestion. It is a chronic 
complaint with bishops and travelling mis- 
sionaries in general. They have to eat so 
many different things, in so many different 
places, that it is a wonder that they have any 
stomachs left. The bishop had ordered for 
himself a large bowl of milk toast. There 
was nothing the matter with the digestive 
apparatus of the bishop's visitor, but in the 
presence of a long and elaborate menu in a 
foreign language he felt somewhat undecided, 
and while the bishop was otherwise engaged 
for the moment, he whispered to the waiter 
to bring him the same things the bishop had 
ordered. What was his amazement and dis- 
appointment, and the bishop's surprise as well, 
when, a few minutes later, the waiter brought 
in two large bowls of milk toast, one of which 
was put at his place, instead of the tempting 
repast which he had anticipated. 



One of the most interesting characters and At the muzzle 
one of the finest Christians that I ever came °J '^^ ^ ^^^ 
153 



^ecoUections of a 

across in my Western life was General Guy 
V. Henry of the United States army, recently 
deceased. He was then only a colonel of cav- 
alry. He had one of the down-stairs rooms 
in that same boarding-house in which I was 
an inmate with the dean to whom I have re- 
ferred in the first paper. The maid-servants 
of the house slept in a small room off the 
kitchen, which was a basement affair. The 
house was a four-storied one, and I lived in 
the garret. About two o'clock one morning 
every one in the house was awakened by a 
series of the wildest shrieks, proceeding from 
the basement. I never heard such a commo- 
tion. The maids rushed up into the hall in a 
state of frantic terror, screaming that there 
was a burglar in the house, and that their 
room had been entered. 

I sprang out of bed, dragged on a pair of 
trousers, seized the poker, tore down the 
stairs, and reached the kitchen, as I was the 
youngest of the men in the house, before any 
of the others. The window was open. The 
ground outside was just on a level with the 
window-sill. Gallantly clutching the poker, 

154 



l^'issionary in tF^e Great West 

I climbed through the window and ran down 
the yard to the back fence. It was a bright 
moonlight night, and the burglar was just 
disappearing around the corner. There was 
nothing I could do, so I waved the poker 
threateningly at him, climbed off the fence, 
and started back to the house. 

When I reached the window, I dropped to 
my knees and prepared to crawl through to 
the kitchen. Just as I thrust my head into 
the darkness of the room, I felt a round, ice- 
cold piece of steel firmly pressed against my 
right temple, and a voice as cold and hard as 
the barrel of the pistol sternly directed me 
to remain perfectly quiet and make no noise, 
else I would get the top of my head blown off. 
The sphinx itself would be a vibrant creature 
beside me at that moment. I was as immobile 
as a pyramid, notwithstanding the fact that 
my heart was beating like a trip-hammer. 
The cold voice called for a light, and when 
the gas was ignited, an iron hand was applied 
to the collar of my nightshirt, and I was 
dragged inboard. 

"Good heaven ! " said the colonel, starting 
155 



^ecoCCections of a 

back in astonishment, but still keeping his 
pistol pointed at my head, "this is a fine po- 
sition for a theological student to be in. 
What are you doing here at this hour?'' 

It took the hardest kind of explaining to 
convince the colonel that I had come down 
there as a knight-errant to rescue the maids, 
and was not the burglar. When I had suc- 
ceeded in convincing him that I was innocent, 
he remarked. 

"Well, I don't see why you did not say who 
you were before." 

I replied that nothing on earth would have 
induced me to open my mouth under the cir- 
cumstances—that he had told me to keep 
quiet, and with the barrel of his revolver at 
my head I fully intended to do so. 

A warrior The colonel was one of the manliest and 
gentlest men I ever met, and as versatile as 
he was brave. There was a young couple in 
the house who had a baby. They were too 
poor to have a nurse, and were therefore de- 
prived of the pleasure of attending church 
together. They were a very devout pair, and 

156 



l^iss'ionary m t^e Great West 

their inability to be away from the baby at 
the same time was a great deprivation to 
them. On Sunday evenings, not once but 
often, I have known Colonel Henry to slip 
away from his family and go up -stairs, and 
take the baby and care for it the whole even- 
ing, so that these two young people could go to 
church together. He was as good a nurse as 
he was a soldier, though some of his methods 
and remedies were certainly peculiar. 

I remember seeing him, on one occasion Gin for the 
after services, rocking to and fro, holding the ^ ^ 

baby clasped tightly against his breast ; and 
when he was asked if the infant had behaved 
itself, he replied : 

"No, it did not— not at first, that is. It 
seemed to have some kind of a cramp, or the 
colic ; but I fixed it all right." 

"What did you do for it, colonel?" 

"Well, I have some fine old Holland gin 
down in my room, and I gave him a good 
dose of it, and you see the result." 

"Heavens ! " exclaimed the young mother, 
in affright, clasping the infant to her breast, 
"maybe you have killed it ! " 
157 



^ecoUectwns of a 

"No, I have n't/' replied the colonel, im- 
perturbably. "It 's all right. I have not 
been in command of a regiment of men for 
ten years without knowing how to take care 
of a baby, madam." 
A grim con- The man had been shot to pieces in the 
^'^^^ Indian wars. Some of the bones in his face 
were supported by artificial plates. He was 
a scarred and battle-worn veteran. The story 
of his exploits stirs the blood. He looked 
his career, too, and there was a strange con- 
trast in the picture presented by the dash- 
ing, brilliant soldier calmly nursing the little 
baby. 

Died at his Colonel Henry bore a prominent part in 
post of duty ^^^ Spanish- American War, and was the first 
governor of Puerto Rico. He came to see me 
in the cabin of a government transport off 
San Juan, where I was lying deathly ill 
with camp and typhoid fever, contracted 
in the service. I was miserably sick, but 
not too sick to read in the dreadfully wasted 
appearance of the stern-featured, kindly old 
soldier, who said words of encouragement 

158 



'Missionary in tF}e Great West 

and greeting to me, that lie himself was in 
a bad way. 

He stuck it out, in spite of every entreaty 
from his friends and the advice of his surgeon, 
until he had accomplished his task and had 
been relieved at the close of his tour of duty. 
Then he came home, and quietly folded up his 
hands, and died like the soldier and gentleman 
that he was, without complaint and without 
parade* He just as truly died for his country 
as if one of the many bullets which had 
stricken him down in some of the many fields 
in the Rebellion and Indian wars, in which 
he had been in action, had ended his life. 

He was one of the humblest and most thor- 
ough-going Christians that I ever knew. I 
remember many times his telling me of the 
Church services that he had conducted. The 
march was never so hard, the pursuit never 
so hurried, the cold never so bitter, the heat 
never so burning, the danger never so immi- 
nent, but that he would find time to take out 
his little worn Prayer-book and read the ser- 
vice of his Church. God bless him ! Peace 
and rest to his memory. 
159 



^ecoUections of a 

A ger^tleman He was not the only hero I ever knew. The 
world is full of heroes, and this was a humble 
one ; but he fairly came in the class. He 
was a conductor on one of the railroads upon 
which I frequently travelled, and I knew him 
very well. My first impression of him was 
that he was a widower. I knew he had one 
son, a lad of whom he was very fond. The 
boy was attending school at a country college 
in a little town through which the railroad 
ran. The youngster was always brought 
down to the station, on the arrival of the train 
every other day, for a word or two of greeting 
with his father. When his duty permitted, 
the conductor used to sit down in the seat by 
me and talk about his boy. The man lived 
for the child alone. He saved his money for 
his education and for one other purpose, and 
spent little or nothing upon himself. 

One day I noticed that his finger was 
roughly tied up, and I asked what was the 
matter. He hesitated a moment, and told me 
he would tell me when we passed the next 
station. There was a long interval after the 
next station before the train stopped again, 

160 



l^issionary in i^e Great West 

and he came back to me and sat down by 
me. 

"Well," lie began, "you know my boy?" 

"Yes," I replied, "I think everybody on 
the road knows him." 

"He 's a good boy, and he had a mother 
once— my wife, of course." The gravity of his 
demeanor prevented me from smiling at this 
naive announcement, and I simply nodded 
my head. 

"We were as happy as could be in our 
home, wife and I and the lad, until one day 
she suddenly went crazy. I think it was 
in her family. And she has been crazy ever 
since. She is in a private retreat back in 
Ohio, and I took a vacation the other day and 
went back to see her, as I always do twice a 
year." 

"Go on," I said, with growing interest. 

"Well, sir, when I was shown into her room 
last week, she came toward me, and I stretched 
out my hand to her. Then she sprang at me 
and caught this finger in her teeth—" He 
hesitated. 

"Could n't you pull it away?" I asked. 
161 



3 'Missionary in i^e Great West 

^^ Yes, I might have, I suppose ; but she was 
crazy, poor thing, and she did not know what 
she was doing. I was afraid I would hurt 
her, so—" He stopped again. 

^^What didyoudo?" 

"Nothing at all, sir. I spoke to her kindly, 
and I just let her chew it until she got 
through. She nearly bit the top off," he re- 
marked quietly, getting up from the seat and 
going toward the door, as the train slackened 
up, nearing the next station. 

Double duty The women, especially the wives of the clergy, 
were heroes, too. I have heard of one who 
played the little organ in the church until 
she was forced to resign her position (which 
was without emolument) on account of an- 
other baby. But a few months found her 
back in her old place. The baby's cradle sat 
by the organ now, and the faithful musician 
pumped the organ with one foot and rocked 
the baby with the other. In addition to all 
this, she led the singing. And it was good 
singing, too. I call that heroic. 



162 



CHAPTEE X 

r[E love of Christmas is as strong in the Christmas-tide 
West as it is in any section of the coun- 
try—perhaps, indeed, stronger, for people 
who have few pleasures cherish holidays more 
highly than those for whom many cheap 
amusements are provided. But when the 
manifestation of the Christmas spirit is con- 
sidered, there is a vast difference between the 
West and the East. There are vast sections of 
country in which evergreens do not grow and 
to which it would not pay to ship them ; con- 
sequently Christmas trees are not common, and 
therefore much prized when they may be had. 
There are no great rows nor small clusters 
of inviting shops filled with suggestive and 
fascinating contents at attractive prices. The 
distances from centres of trade are so great 
that the things which may be purchased even 
in the smallest towns in more favorable locali- 
ties for a few cents have there almost a pro- 
163 



^ecoUeciions of a 

hibitive price upon them. The efforts of the 
people to give their children a merry Christ- 
mas in the popular sense, however, are strong 
and sometimes pitiful. 

Poor founda- It must not be forgotten that the West is 
^^°'^^ settled by Eastern people, and that no very 
great difference exists between them, save for 
the advantages presented by life in the West 
for the higher development of character. 
Western people are usually brighter, quicker, 
more progressive, and less conservative and 
more liberal than those from whom they came. 
The survival of the fittest is the rule out 
there, and the qualities of character necessary 
to that end are brought to the top in the 
strenuous life necessitated by the hardships 
of the frontier. If the people are not any 
better than they were, it is because they are 
still clinging to the obsolete ideas of the 
East. 

Why the clergy The Eastern point of view always reminds 
me of the reply of the bishop to the layman 
who was deploring the poor quality of the 
clergy. "Yes," said the bishop, "some of 

164 



are no better 



]}/[is6ionarY in tge Great West 

them are poor ; but consider the stock from 
which they come ! You see, we have nothing 
but laymen out of which to make them." .-•" 

The East never understands the West— the Invincible 

ignorance 

real West, that is, which lies beyond the Mis- 
sissippi, the Missouri, and the Eocky Moun- 
tains. They know nothing of its ideas, its 
capacities, its possibilities, its educational fa- 
cilities, its culture, its real power, in the East. 
And they do not wish to learn, apparently. 
The Easterners fatuously think, like Job, that 
they are the people, and wisdom will die with 
them. Some years since, an article in the 
"Forum" on the theme, "Kansas more civi- 
lized than New York," conclusively proved 
the proposition to the satisfaction of the pres- 
ent writer at least. 

I sat at a dinner-table, one day, when the 
salted almonds were handed me with the re- 
mark : "I suppose you never saw anything 
like these out West. Try some." And 
my wife has been quite gravely asked if we 
feared any raids by the Indians, and if they 
troubled us by their marauding, in Kansas. 
165 



^ecoUections of a 

I have found it necessary to inform tlie 
curious that we did not live in tepees or 
wigwams in Nebraska. 

77?^ location of One day I was talking with a man, and a 
very stupid man at that, who informed me 
that he graduated from Harvard ; to which 
surprising statement he added the startling 
information, for the benefit of my presumably 
untutored occidental mind, that it was a 
college near Boston ! They have everything 
in the West that the East has so far as their 
sometimes limited means will provide them, 
and when they have no money, they have pa- 
tience, endurance, grim determination, and 
courage, which are better than money in the 
long run. 

Better every- The cities and smaller towns especially, as 
^^^towns ^ ^v^Q^ are cleaner, better governed, more pro- 
gressive, better provided with improvements 
and comforts than corresponding places in 
the East. Scarcely a community exists with- 
out its water- works, electric-light plant, tele- 
phone system, trolleys, paved streets, etc. 
Of course, this does not apply to the extreme 
frontier, in which my field of work largely 

166 



"{VlissionarY in t^e Great West 

lay. The conditions were different there— 
the people, too. 

But to return to Christmas. One Christmas A safe bet 
day I left my family at one o'clock in the 
morning. Christmas salutations were ex- 
changed at that very sleepy hour, and I took 
the fast express to a certain station whence I 
could drive up country to a little church on a 
farm in which there had never been a Christ- 
mas service. It was a bitter cold morning, deep 
snow on the ground, and a furious north wind 
raging. The climate is variable indeed out 
West. I have spent Christmas days on which 
it rained all day ; and of all days in the year 
on which to have it rain, Christmas is the 
worst. Still, the farmers would be thankful. 
It was usually safe to be thankful out there 
whenever it rained. I knew a man once who 
said you could make a fortune by always bet- 
ting two to one that it would not rain, no 
matter what the present promise of the 
weather was. You were bound to win nine 
times out of ten. 

I hired a good sleigh and two horses, and 
167 



^ecoUections of a 

Service in furs drove to my destination. The cliurch was a 
little old brick building right out on the 
prairie. There was a smouldering fire in a 
miserable, worn-out stove which hardly raised 
the temperature of the room a degree, al- 
though it filled the place with smoke. The 
wind had free entrance through the ill-fitting 
window- and door-frames, and a little pile of 
snow formed on the altar during the service. 
I think there were twelve people who had 
braved the fury of the storm. There was not 
an evergreen within a hundred miles of the 
place, and the only decoration was sage-brush. 
To wear vestments was impossible, and I con- 
ducted the service in a buffalo overcoat and a 
fur cap and gloves, as I have often done. It 
was short, and the sermon was shorter. 

A queer Christ- After service I went to dinner at the near- 
est farm-house. Such a Christmas dinner it 
was ! There was no turkey, and they did not 
even have a chicken. The menu was corn- 
bread, ham, and potatoes, and few potatoes at 
that. There were two children in the family, 
a girl of six and a boy of five. They were 
glad enough to get the ham. Their usual bill 

168 



'Missionary in tFfe Great West 

of fare was composed of potatoes and corn- 
bread, and sometimes corn-bread alone. My 
wife bad put up a luncb for me,— fearing tbat 
I migbt not be able to get anything to catk- 
in which there was a small mince-pie turn- 
over ; and the children had slipped a small 
box of candy in my bag as a Christmas gift. I 
produced the turnover, which by common 
consent was divided between the astonished 
children. Such a glistening of eyes and 
smacking of small lips you never saw ! 

"This pie makes it seem like Christmas, 
after all," said the little girl, with her mouth 
full. 

"Yes," said the boy, ditto,— "that and the 
ham." 

"We did n't have any Christmas this year," Potato men 
continued the small maiden. "Last year 
mother made us some potato men" (i.e., 
little animal and semi-human figures made 
out of potatoes and matches, with buttons for 
eyes ; they go into many stockings among the 
very poor out West). 

"But this year," interrupted the boy, "po- 
tatoes are so scarce that we could n't have 
169 



^ecoUectlons of a 

'em. Mother says that next year perhaps we 
will have some real Christmas." 

Robbing- the They were so brave about it that my heart 
went out to them. Children and no Christ- 
mas gifts ! Only the eh ill, bare room, the 
wretched, meagre meal. I ransacked my 
brain. Finally something occurred to me. 
After dinner I excused myself and hurried 
back to the church. There were two baskets 
there which were used for the collection- 
old, but rather pretty. I selected the best 
one. Fortunately I had in my grip a neat 
little "housewife " which contained a pair of 
scissors, a huge thimble, needles, thread, a 
tiny little pin-cushion, an emery bag, buttons, 
etc. I am, like most ex-sailors, something of 
a needleman myself. I emptied the contents 
into the collection-basket, and garnished the 
dull little affair with the bright ribbon ties 
ripped off the housewife, and went back to 
the house. 

Christmas gifts To the boy I gave my penknife, which 
happened to be nearly new, and to the girl 
the church basket with the sewing-things for 
a work-basket. The j oy of those children was 

170 



Missionary in tF)e Great West 

one of the finest things I have ever witnessed. 
The face of the little girl was positively filled 
with awe as she lifted from the basket, one by 
one, the pretty and useful articles the house- 
wife had supplied, and when I added the 
small box of candy that my children had pro- 
vided me, they looked at me with feelings of 
reverence, almost as a visible incarnation of 
Santa Claus. They were the cheapest and 
most effective Christmas presents it was ever 
my pleasure to bestow. I hope to be forgiven 
for putting the church furniture to such a 
secular use. 

Another Christmas day I had a funeral. A Christmas 

funeral 

There was no snow, no rain. The day was 
warm. The woman who died had been the 
wife of one of the largest farmers in the 
diocese. He actually owned a continuous 
body of several thousand acres of fine land, 
much of it under cultivation. She had been 
a fruitful mother, and five stalwart sons, all 
married, and several daughters likewise, with 
numerous grandchildren, represented her con- 
tribution to the world's population. They 
171 



^ecoUectlons of a 

were the people of the most consideration in 
the little community in which they lived. 
We had the services in the morning in the 
Methodist church, which was big enough to 
hold about six hundred people. As it was a 
holiday, it was filled to the very doors. One 
of my farmer friends remarked, as we stood 
on the front steins watching the crowd 
assembling : 

"My, doc ! all of them wagons gatherin' 
here makes it seem more like circus day than 
a funeral." 
Shouting con- I had been asked to preach a sermon, which 
I essayed to do. The confusion was terrific. 
In order to be present themselves, the 
mothers in Israel had been obliged to bring 
their children, and the most domestic of at- 
tentions were being bestowed upon them 
freely. They cried and wailed and expostu- 
lated with their parents in audible tones until 
I was nearly frantic. I found myself shout- 
ing consoling platitudes to a sobbing, grief- 
stricken band of relatives, and endeavoring to 
drown the noise of the children by roaring— 
the lion's part a la Bottom. It was distract- 

172 



]}/[issionarY m t^e Great West 

ing. I was a very young minister at the time, 
and the perspiration fairly rained from me. 
That ^s what makes me remember it was a 
warm day. 

When we got through the services, after A Methuselah 
every one of the six hundred had, in the 
language of the local undertaker, "viewed the 
remains,'' we went to the cemetery. I rode 
behind a horse which was thirty-eight years 
old. I do not know what his original color 
had been, but at present he was white and 
hoary with age. 

"I always use him for funerals," said the 
undertaker, "because he naturally sets the 
proper pace for a funeral procession." 

"Mercy ! " said I. "I hope he won't die on 
the road." 

"Well, if he does," continued the under- 
taker, "your services will come in handy. 
We can bury him proper. I am awful fond 
of that horse. I should n't wonder if he 
had n't been at as many as a thousand funer- 
als in his life." 

I thought he had all the gravity of his 
grewsome experiences, especially in his gait. 
173 



^ecoUeciions of a 



The Christmas dinners were all late on 
account of the funeral, but they were bountiful 
and good nevertheless, and I much enjoyed 
mine. 

A siww-bound Another Christmas I was snow-bound on one 
of the obscure branches of a Western rail- 
road. If the train had been on time I would 
have made a connection and have reached 
home by Christmas eve, but it was very evi- 
dent, as the day wore on, that it was not going 
to be on time. Indeed, it was problematical 
whether it would get anywhere at all. It 
was snowing hard outside. Our progress had 
become slower and slower. Finally, in a deep 
cut, we stopped. There were three men, one 
woman, and two little children in the car— no 
other passengers in the train. The train was 
of that variety known out West as a "plug," 
consisting of a combination baggage and 
smoker and one coach. 

One of the trainmen started on a lonely 
and somewhat dangerous tramp of several 
miles up the road to the next station to call 
for the snow-plough, and the rest of us settled 

174 



'Missionary in tge Great West 

down to spend the niglit. Certainly we could 
not hope to be extricated before the next 
evening, especially as the storm then gave no 
signs of abating. We all went up to the front 
of the car and sat around the stove, in which 
we kept up a bright fire,— fortunately, we 
had plenty of fuel,— and in such circumstances 
we speedily got acquainted with each other. 
One of the men was a "drummer," a travel- 
ling man for a notion house ; another was a 
cow-boy ; the third was a big cattle- man ; and 
I was the last. We soon found that the 
woman was a widow who had maintained 
herself and the children precariously, since the 
death of her husband, by sewing and other 
feminine odd jobs, but had at last given up 
the unequal struggle, and was going back to 
live with her mother, also a widow, who had 
some little property. 

The poor little threadbare children had Disappointment 
cherished anticipations of a joyous Christmas 
with their grandmother. From their talk we 
could hear that a Christmas tree had been 
promised them, and all sorts of things. They 
were intensely disappointed at the blockade. 
175 



^ecoUections of a 

They cried and sobbed, and would not be 
comforted. Fortunately the woman had a 
great basket filled with substantial provisions, 
which, by the way, she generously shared with 
the rest of us, so we were none of us hungry. 
As the night fell, we tipped up two of the 
seats, placed the bottoms sideways, and with 
our overcoats made two good beds for the lit- 
tle folks. Just before they went to sleep, the 
drummer said to me : 

"Say, parson, we 've got to give those chil- 
dren some Christmas ! " 

"That 's what," said the cow-boy. 

"I 'm agreed," added the cattle-man. 

"Madam," said the drummer, addressing 
the woman with the easy assurance of his 
class, after a brief consultation between us, 
"we are going to give your kids some 
Christmas." 

The woman beamed at him gratefully. 

"Yes, children," said the now enthused 
drummer, as he turned to the open-mouthed 
children, "Santa Claus is coming round to- 
night, sure. We want you to hang up your 
stockings." 

176 



'j^lssionary m tP)e Great West 

"We ain't got none/' quivered the little 
girl, "'ceptin' those we 've got on, and ma 
says it 's too cold to take 'em off." 

"I 've got two new pair of woollen socks," 
said the cattle-man, eagerly, "which I ain't 
never wore, and you are welcome to 'em." 

There was a clapping of little hands in Anticipation 
childish glee, and then the two faces fell as 
the elder remarked : 

"But Santa Claus will know they are not 
our stockings, and he will fill them with 
things for you instead." 

"Lord love you," said the burly cattle-man, 
roaring with infectious laughter, "he won't 
bring me nothin'. One of us will sit up, any- 
way, and tell him it 's for you. You 've got 
to hustle to bed right away, because he may 
be here any time now." 

Then came one of those spectacles which " Noio I lay 
we sometimes meet once or twice in a life- 
time. The children knelt down on the rough 
floor of the car beside their improvised beds. 
Instinctively the hands of the men went to 
their heads, and at the first words of "Now I 
lay me down to sleep," four hats came off. 
177 



me 



^ecoUeciions of a 

The cow-boy stood twirling Ms hat and look- 
ing at the little kneeling figures ; the cattle- 
man's vision seemed dimmed 5 while in the 
eyes of the travelling man there shone a dis- 
tant look— a look across snow-filled prairies 
to a warmly lighted home. 

The children were soon asleep. Then the 
rest of us engaged in earnest conversation. 
What should we give them ? was the question. 

^^It don't seem to me that I 've got any- 
thing to give 'em/' said the cow-boy, mourn- 
fully, ^^ unless the little kid might like my 
spurs ; an' I would give my gun to the little 
girl, though on general principles I don't 
like to give up a gun. You never know 
when you 're goin' to need it, specially with 
strangers," he added, with a rather suspicious 
glance at me. I would not have harmed him 
for the world. 

''I 'm in much the same fix," said the cattle- 
man. '^I 've got a flask of prime old whiskey 
here, but it don't seem like it 's very appro- 
priate for the occasion, though it 's at the 
service of any of you gents." 

^^ Never seen no occasion in which whiskey 

178 



l^issionarY in t^e Great West 



was n't appropriate/' said the cow-boy, mel- Alivays in 

order 

lowing at the sight of the flask. 

^^I mean 't ain't fit for kids," explained the 
cattle -man, handing it over. 

^^I begun on 't rather early," remarked the 
puncher, taking a long drink, "an' I always 
use it when my feelin's is onsettled, like 
now." He handed it back with a sigh. 

"Never mind, boys," said the drummer. 
"You all come along with me to the baggage- 
car." 

So off we trooped. He opened his trunks, 
and spread before us such a glittering array 
of trash and trinkets as almost took away our 
breath. 

"There," he said, "look at that. We '11 Santa Claus 
just pick out the best things from the lot, and 
I '11 donate them all." 

"No, you don't," said the cow-boy. "My 
ante 's in on this game, an' I 'm goin' to buy 
what chips I want, an' pay fer 'em, too, else 
there ain't goin' to be no Christmas around 
here ! " 

"That 's my judgment, too," said the cattle- 
man. 
179 



^ecoUections of a 

"I think that will be fair/' said I. '^The 
travelling man can donate what he pleases, 
and we can each of us buy what we please, 
as well." 

I think we spent hours looking over the 
stock which the obliging man spread out all 
over the car for us. He was going home, he 
said, and everything was at our service. The 
trainmen caught the infection, too, and all 
hands finally went back to the coach with 
such a load of stuff as you never saw before. 
We filled the socks, and two seats besides, 
with it. The grateful mother was simply 
dazed. 

As we all stood about, gleefully surveying 
our handiwork, including the bulging socks, 
the engineer remarked : 

^^We 've got to get some kind of a Christ- 
mas tree." 

And a Christ- So two of US ploughed off on the prairie, 
mas tree . . , . 

—it had stopped snowing and was bright 

moonlight,— and wandered around until we 

found a good-sized piece of sage-brush, which 

we brought back and solemnly installed, and 

the woman decoi-ated it with bunches of tissue- 

180 



'iD/liss'ionarY m tge Great West 

paper from the notion stock and clean waste 
from the engine. We hung the train lanterns 
around it. 

We were so excited that we actually could 
not sleep. The contagion of the season was 
strong upon us, and I know not which were 
the more delighted the next morning, the 
children or the amateur Santa Clauses, when 
they saw what the cow-boy called the "lay- 
out." 

Great goodness ! Those children never did 
have, and probably never will have, such a 
Christmas again. And to see the thin face of 
that mother flush with unusual color when we 
handed her one of those monstrous red plush 
albums which we had purchased jointly, and 
in which we had all written our names in lieu 
of our photographs, and between the leaves 
of which the cattle-man had generously 
slipped a hundred- dollar bill, was worth being 
blockaded for a dozen Christmases. Her eyes 
filled with tears, and she fairly sobbed be- 
fore us. 

During the morning we had a little service Christmas ser- 
vice and dinner, 
m the car, m accordance with the custom of too 

181 



^ecoUecUons of a 

the Church, and I am sure no more heartfelt 
body of worshippers ever poured forth their 
thanks for the Incarnation than those men, 
that woman, and the little children. The 
woman sang ^^ Jesus, Lover of my Soul," from 
memory, in her poor little voice, and that 
small but reverent congregation— cow-boy, 
drummer, cattle-man, trainmen, and parson— 
solemnly joined in. 

^^It feels just like church," said the cow-boy, 
gravely, to the cattle- man. ^^Say, I 'm all 
broke up ; let 's go in the other car and try 
your flask ag'in." It was his unfailing re- 
source for "onsettled feelin's." 

The train-hand who had gone on to division 
headquarters returned with the snow-plough 
early in the afternoon, but, what was more to 
the purpose, he brought a whole cooked turkey 
with him, so the children had turkey, a 
Christmas tree, and Santa Claus to their heart's 
content. I did not get home until the day 
after Christmas. 

But, after all, what a Christmas I had 
enjoyed ! 



182 



Missionary m t^e Great West 

During a season of great privation we were ''Real Chris'- 
much assisted by barrels of clothing which 
were sent to us from the East. One day, just 
before Christmas, I was distributing the con- 
tents of several barrels of wearing apparel and 
other necessities to the women and children 
at a little mission. The delight of the women, 
as the good, warm articles of clothing for 
themselves and their children which they so 
sadly needed were handed out to them, was 
touching ; but the children themselves did not 
enter into the joy of the occasion with the 
same spontaneity. Finally, just as I got to 
the bottom of one box, and before I had 
opened the other one, a little boy, sniffling to 
himself in the corner, remarked, sotto voce, 
"Ain't there no real Chris' mus gif's in there 
for us little fellers, too!" 

I could quite enter into his feelings, for I 
could remember in my youthful days, when 
careful relatives had provided me with a 
"cardigan" jacket, three handkerchiefs, and 
a half dozen pairs of socks for Christmas, that 
the season seemed to me like a hollow mock- 
ery, and the attempt to palm off necessities 
183 



Recollections of a 

as Christmas gifts filled my childish heart 
with disapproval. I am older now, and can 
face a Christmas remembrance of a cook-book, 
a silver cake -basket, or an ice-cream freezer 
(some of which I have actually received) with 
philosophical equanimity, if not gratitude. 

I opened the second box, therefore, with a 
great longing, though but little hope. 
Heaven bless the women who had packed 
that box ! for, in addition to the usual neces- 
sary articles, there were dolls^ knives, books, 
games galore, so the small fry had some ^^real 
Chris'mus gif's " as well as the others. 

Frozen to After one of the blizzards a young ranchman 
who had gone into the nearest town, some 
twenty miles away, to get some Christmas 
things for his wife and little ones, was found 
frozen to death on Christmas morning, his 
poor little packages of petty Christmas gifts 
tightly clasped in his cold hands lying by 
his side. His horse was frozen, too, and when 
they found it, hanging to the horn of the 
saddle was a little piece of an evergreen-tree 
—you would throw it away in contempt in 

184 



Missionary in tge Great West 

the East, it was so puny. There it meant 
something. The love of Christmas? It was 
there in his dead hands. The spirit of Christ- 
mas? It showed itself in that bit of verdant 
pine over the lariat at the saddle-bow of the 
poor bronco. 

Do they have Christmas out West? Well, 
they have it in their hearts, if no place else, 
and, after all, that is the place above all others 
where it should be. 



185 



The 
man 
knew 



CHAPTEE XI 

greatest /^ERTAINLY, in every sense, the greatest 
\J man with whom I ever came in contact 
was the bishop of one of the Western dioceses 
in which I was archdeacon. We used to think 
that his talents were wasted in the West, and 
that he should have been at the head of some 
important university or the bishop of some 
great Eastern diocese ; but the people among 
whom he ministered were entirely assured 
that he was the right man in the right place, 
and they loved him with a devotion such as 
few men receive. He was a Yale man, a 
Berkeley man, a Heidelberg man, a special 
student in some of the best European schools, 
a deep thinker, a clear expositor, a profound 
theologian, and a brilliant philosopher. 

He was able to clothe the deepest truth in 
the simplest form, to speak of the most pro- 
found things in so perspicuous a way that the 
plainest could understand. His learning and 

186 



3 JVl'issionary in t^e Great West 

wisdom were accompanied by more than ordi- 
nary simplicity of character and sweetness of 
disposition. He was a versatile man as well. 
Indeed, one of his professors told him, when 
he was a young man, that he did too many 
things well ever to do anything very well. 
In addition to his other qualities, he was an 
accomplished chess-player, the champion of 
his college in his younger days. 

One day he visited a certain town in which Gambling for 
.,_ 1 -..u the children 

there was a woman with several children 

whom she was anxious to have baptized. Her 

husband, who happened to be a Yale man 

also, had refused his consent. The bishop 

was a guest at her house, and she had besought 

him to argue the point with her husband and 

get his permission to baptize the children. 

He was a lawyer, and pointedly refused to 

discuss theology with the bishop, adroitly 

evading the question every time it was raised. 

The gentleman was also a chess-player, and 

an extraordinarily good one. He was not 

only the champion of the town, but of a very 

much wider circle, and he had discovered, or 

invented, a new opening not in the books. 

187 



^ecoUect'ions of a 

He found out that the bishop played chess, 
and he said he would like to try this opening 
upon him. The bishop knew that there were 
various ways to get at a man, so he consented 
to play a game. The opening worked beauti- 
fully, and after a rather hard struggle the 
bishop was defeated. They tried it again, 
and this time, after a longer and harder 
struggle, the bishop was victorious. A third 
game was decided more quickly in the bishop's 
favor, and in the fourth game, having mas- 
tered the opening, he swept the board. The 
lawyer was very much chagrined, and begged 
for another trial. 

^'No," said the bishop, calmly, gravely push- 
ing away the board ; "you told me you were a 
player when you began, but you hardly afford 
me common amusement. You actually do 
not know the first principles of the game" 
(which was an exaggeration), "and you do not 
know any more about theology than you know 
about chess" (which was quite true). 

The lawyer was by this time fairly indig- 
nant, and quite willing to argue or fight about 
chess, theology, or anything else. 

188 



'Missionary m i^e Great West 

The next morning, bright and early, the 
bishop met his hostess coming down the stairs. 

"What did you do to my husband last 
night?" she asked eagerly. 

"I did not do anything, madam. We had 
a few games of chess and then a little theo- 
logical argument. Why do you ask ? " 

"Well," she said, in great glee, "he came 
up -stairs about two o'clock this morning, and 
waked me up and said, ^ Jane, I guess you 'd 
better have the children baptized in the 
morning.' " 

We used to tell the bishop that he certainly 
had gambled for those children. 

One day we were travelling across the plains Turning the 
in the caboose of a freight-train. A young 
divinity student was with us. He was one 
of the ambitious kind of divinity students, 
who wreck a parish or two when they begin, 
and finally drift upon the ecclesiastical bar- 
gain-counter. He was ready to argue about 
anything with anybody. A greasy, dilapi- 
dated-looking tramp came into the caboose at 
one of the stations at the end of a division, 
189 



^ecoUections of a 

and presently engaged in a heated discussion 
with the young theologian on the disadvan- 
tages of education. 

He maintained the affirmative^ that the less 
a man knew and the less education he had 
the happier he was, with so much skill and 
adroitness, and showed such mastery of logic 
and literature, that he routed the poor boy, 
horse, foot, and dragoons— so effectively, in 
fact, that the young man rose and went out 
on the platform to hide his chagrin, leaving 
the supposed tramp chuckling over his pipe 
in huge enjoyment at his easy victory. The 
bishop had listened without saying a word, 
and when the student left he turned to the 
man and inquired sharply : 

^^What college are you from, sir?" 

''Yale," answered the man, without 
thinking. 

The unlucky admission completely de- 
stroyed the man's argument, for he was a 
living example of the fallacy of his own 
proposition. He was one of the engineers of 
the road, and afterwards a great friend of the 
bishop. 

190 



l^lssionarY in tge Great West 

One day in a certain town a certain church, Revising their 

cveed 
not of our communion, of course, resolved to 

revise its formulas of belief ; in other words, to 
make a new creed for itself and its members. 
In order that there might not be the slightest 
suggestion of ecclesiastical domination, that 
they might avoid the slightest appearance 
even of sacerdotalism, the committee ap- 
pointed to draw up the creed was composed 
of a lawyer, a farmer, and a merchant, all 
practical men, with the minister religiously, 
or irreligiously, excluded. The bishop was 
passing along the street, when the lawyer 
stepped out of his office and called him in. 
Two perplexed and embarrassed men sat at a 
long table on which were placed Webster's 
Dictionary, a Cruden's Concordance, a Bible, 
a Prayer-book, and the Westminster Con- 
fession. 

"These," said the lawyer, introducing the 
bishop, "are my colleagues on a committee to 
draw up a creed for our church. We have 
gotten as far as the Holy Ghost, and, to tell 
the truth, as we do not any of us know any- 
thing about the Holy Ghost, we thought you 
191 



l^ecoUect'ions of a 

might give us a little information for our 
Articles of Belief.'^ 



A compromise This reminds me of a certain other church 
organization which attempted to draw up a 
creed in the same way for the government of 
its members. When the result of the labors 
of the committee appointed was read there 
was great dissatisfaction. Some wanted more, 
some wanted less, and there was imminent 
danger of the complete disruption of the 
organization until the chairman of the com- 
mittee arose with the delightful suggestion 
that they compromise. So a compromise 
creed was drawn up and that particular enter- 
prise saved from shipwreck. 

Having fun with The bishop had a relative who was a profes- 
^ sional man in an Eastern city, and a very able 
man indeed, but he had unfortunately become 
tinged with some of the prevalent ideas of the 
age. He belonged to a coterie of men who 
thought as he, and when the bishop announced 
his intention of visiting him, this little club 
of modern thinkers determined to have some 

192 



^IsslonarY in tF^e Great West 

fun with the old man— in a kindly polite way, 
of course ; so they invited him to dinner, 
which was to cover a discussion in which they 
felt certain of coming out first best. 

There was fun enough at the dinner, but 
the sport was in the hands of the bishop. He 
early detected their plan, met their attack on 
their own grounds, and routed them com- 
pletely. One by one, they shamefacedly stole 
away, and the morning rose with the little 
bishop triumphant and alone on the field of 
battle. One by one, the young men came to 
see him during the next day and apologized 
for the part they had taken, even though in 
a spirit of harmless fun, and many of them 
date the change in their opinions from that 
hour. 

Everybody listened to the man. I remember An interested 

once driving across the country with him 

while discussing the nature of the soul. That 

is, the bishop was discussing. I was only 

prompting by a question now and then. We 

were on the rear seat of a wagon, with the 

driver on the front seat. It was a very dark 

193 



^ecoUections of a 

night. In the middle of the bishop's exposi- 
tion, the wagon took a wild plunge, there was 
a crash, and over we went into the muddy 
ditch. 

"I beg your pardon, gents," said the driver, 
who had retained control of the horses, as we 
scrambled to our feet. "I was so interested in 
hearin' the little man discussin' my immortial 
soul— w'ich I hardly ever knowed that I had 
one before— that I clean forgot where we was, 
an' drove you plump into the ditch ! " 

Eagerlisteners I have engaged him in conversation in the 
same way on a railroad, and he would con- 
tinue to talk on until he would wake up with 
a start to the fact that most of the passengers 
in the car had crowded around his seat and 
were listening. 

"I tell you," said a cow-boy to me, after 
hearing a discussion on the Atonement, "that 
little feller knows a heap about them things, 
don't he?" 



A ritualist One day he held a service in a little town 
where there had never before been a service 

194 



]y{iss'ionarY in t^e Great West 

of the Church. There were only two commu- 
nicants in the village— a man and his wife. 
Services were held in a hired hall, and there 
were about four hundred people present. 
The man assisted the bishop in rendering the 
service, and the congregation sat in interested 
silence through the whole of it. The next 
day, when one of those who had been present 
was asked her opinion of the services, she re- 
plied with feminine exaggeration : 

^^Oh, they were perfectly grand ; and I think 

that duet between the bishop and Mr. S 

was just lovely ! " 

We used to say that the bishop had turned 
ritualistic, because it was evident from this 
that he had been intoning the service. 

We depended upon him for everything, and Providing 
we never asked help of him in vain. His own Ty?S~ 
salary, his private fortune, his personal credit, 
were always at the service of his diocese, his 
clergy, and his people. He had many strange 
requests made of him. 

"What do you think of this?" he said one 
day, smiling and looking up from a letter he 
195 



^ecoUections of a 

had been reading. ^^Here 's a missionary 
wants a set of false teeth ! " 

He got them, too. The bishop paid for 
them. Indeed, there was no other way. 
Things were so depressed, that year, that the 
bishop not only had to get bread and butter 
for his clergy, but he had to provide some of 
them with teeth to enable them to eat it. 

Broken down The little giant is dead now— broken down. 
All that I ever did in the way of work or 
suffered in the way of hardships, if they could 
be called so, he did over and over again, and 
suffered much more, and he was an old man 
twice my age, and not naturally physically 
strong as I was. In addition to the mere 
physical labor which he shared in common 
with his clergy, he had upon his shoulders 
things which no one could relieve him of: 
responsibilities, anxieties, financial demands, 
the care of all the churches— appalling bur- 
dens ! Full of years, developing in power, 
ability, and experience in the most extraordi- 
nary progression with every added hour of his 
life, with infinite possibilities of future useful- 

196 



'Missionary m tge Great West 

ness before him, he had to break down under 
the pressure. 

Western dioceses are bishop -killers at best. Bishop-killers 
No, that is unjust. It is the Church herself 
which kills her bishops. She puts them in 
positions where their faculties are taxed to 
the utmost naturally ; she gives them rank, 
position, a bare living ; and then she loads 
upon their shoulders, if they be men, as they 
always are, who see the opportunities, accept 
the responsibilities, and endeavor to fulfil the 
obligations of their position, burdens too 
heavy for any mortal man to bear. She pro- 
vides them with little money, a mere pittance 
in comparison with their needs, gives them a 
few men, not always those best suited to ef- 
fectually advance the work, and expects them 
to go forward. 

There was a certain missionary jurisdiction 
vacant, not long since. The former bishop 
had raised from ten to thirty thousand dollars 
every year among his Eastern friends to carry 
on that work. He could do this because he 
made friends by his winning, charming per- 
sonality, his eloquence, his ready wit, the 
197 



^ecoUections of a 

stories he had to tell, the experiences he had 
undergone. The money was well spent. It 
sustained hundreds of Church works of dif- 
ferent sorts, many of them just beginning. 
The man who was selected to take up that 
work would have to face the absolute neces- 
sity of continuing to get approximately that 
amount, or allowing the work already begun 
to stop. That is a fearful obligation to set 
before a new and untried man, and the alter- 
native is crushing. 

In apostolic If those Western bishops are not walking in 
^ ^P^ apostolic footsteps, I know of no men who do 
so walk. It is the most exhausting, wearying, 
heartbreaking lot that can fall to any mortal 
man, to be a Western missionary bishop, and 
most of them fight it out until they die. The 
people are helpful, grateful, and appreciative. 
They do what they can. Let none blame 
them. The story of the struggle of the 
Church in the West is the story of a great 
tragedy on the part of clergy and people ; but 
it is through successive tragedies that men do 
arrive and attain, after all. 

198 



l^issionary m i^e Great West 

The hem of the garment of Progress is 
dabbled with the blood of men who have 
made way for her by the giving up of the 
treasure of their hearts to facilitate her ad- 
vance. In that deluge of men which has 
rolled ever westward over the prairies, crept 
up the long slopes of the Rocky Mountains, 
finally beating over them in mighty waves, to 
fall in thunderous surges of inundation on the 
other side, those who have led the way on the 
crest of the waves have been beaten into 
human spray, and having so smoothed the 
path, are cast aside. 

The footprints of civilization are those 
made by the feet of the men who stand 
beautiful upon the wild prairies and high 
mountain-tops of the West, and bring good 
tidings, that publish peace, that cry unto 
Zion, '^Thy God reigneth." It is happiness to 
me that during the youngest, freshest, strong- 
est, and most enthusiastic portion of my life I 
was associated with them— bishops, priests, 
and people. 

There are men like Rowe of Alaska, Ken- A roll of men 
drick of Arizona, Whitaker of Nevada, Leon- 
199 



g ]}/['issionarY in tge Great West 

ard of Western Colorado, Tuttle of Salt Lake, 
Hare of Dakota, Brewer of Montana, Graves 
of the Platte, Talbot of Wyoming, Spaulding 
of Colorado, Worthington of Nebraska, Brooke 
of the Indian Territory, Whipple, Gilbert, 
Gilfillan, of Minnesota, and Millspaugh and 
the noble Thomas of Kansas, who have fought 
and struggled and passed through as great 
adventures as the paladins of old. 

I do not presume for a moment to place 
myself even in juxtaposition with such as 
they. They had, or have, stories to tell 
which would stir the blood, if they could only 
be induced to proclaim them. 
Just the These little sketches have only this value ; 

they may perhaps fairly represent what the 
average missionary undergoes and must expect 
in that great empire of the West in which 
some day will lie the balance of power of the 
great Republic. I, though born in the East 
and living there now, say, God speed the day ! 



average 



200 



SEP 1 190Q 



